Week 4: Culture, the natural environment, and utilitarian explanations

Week 4: Culture, the natural environment, and utilitarian explanations

ANTH 1002: Anthropology for a better world (Semester 2, 2026)
August 25, 2026

Even people who say they respect cultural differences and embrace multiculturalism will still assume that people’s behavior is driven by utilitarian motives, and societies will inevitably change when people encounter new and different technology. Anthropology rejects this.

Main reading: Århem (1989); Holtzman (2009)

Other reading: Palmer (2020)

All you can eat: The Auhelawa diet

People of Auhelawa grow most of their own food, including ʻwateya (Dioscorea alata yam).

ʻWateya

• is planted in the dry summer months, then
• matures slowly over 7 months, and then
• harvested all at once and stored.

When the previous year’s yam harvest is gone and the seeds from that harvest are planted, people enter the “hungry time” (tagwala) and their diet changes. They eat:

• sweet potato
• cassava
• halutu, another species of yam
• banana
• breadfruit
• fish
• rats
• leafy greens
• pumpkin
• occasionally taro
• large bolied chestnuts
• wild mushrooms
• pineapples (especially around Christmas)
• mango (native and Queensland varieties)
• miscellaneous fruits (five-corner, papaya, mangosteen, guava, passionfruit, jackfruit, custard apple)

Why is the period between the end of the last harvest and the arrival of the new harvest a “hungry” time?

What’s for dinner?

People are different, and cultures are different, but everyone needs to eat.

• Feeling hunger is a universal and innate trait.
• Every society will have some way for its members, individually and collectively, to meet this need.

What people eat, and how society teaches members to accomplish their daily food quest, is up for grabs.

• Some societies identify 3 things as food.
• Some societies have a diet of dozens or hundreds of food items.

People do “eat anyhow” (as Auhelawa might say), but many personal practices are not perceived as eating food.

• Most of the items in the Auhelawa tagwala diet—especially nuts, mushrooms, greens, and tree fruits—are not “real” food and are not thought to satiate hunger or provide nourishment.
• When asked to describe a typical diet, people will usually name four traditional crops: ʻwateya, halutu, banana, and taro. When pressed to list everything they ate in the last day, a person will then eventually name several other more distinct food items.

Like most societies, Auhelawa people are surrounded by possible foods which they would never eat.

• For instance, they don’t eat palm weevil larvae (sago grubs) or other insects, and rarely eat snake, but do eat river prawns and sea turtle eggs. Pregnant women and nursing mothers abstain from several sources of protein, and so hunt for rats. (Nb. These prohibitions have no relationship to physical facts of pregnancy or nursing. See Week 3: Culture is not biology.)

Are differences in culture caused by the environment?

Over history, a number of thinkers have tried to explain people’s differences by saying they are caused by climate.

• Hippocrates, Greek physician, writes that “Asians” are gentle and “Europeans” are bellicose because of the climate (Hippocrates 400BC, pt. 16).
• Ibn Khaldun, Arab historian, argued that the most advanced civilizations lay in temperate climates and not in tropical ones (Siddiqi and Oliver 2005).
• Montesquieu ([1748] 1777, 296–98) says that people of “southern” climates are indolent physically and mentally, and thus live by traditional rules that they never think about changing.
• In Boas’s time, Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington argued that all cultures were products of their environmental geography (see Wallis 1926).

Many of these arguments are sophisticated and appear to be bolstered by evidence, but they all sound the same.

• Everyone else is too much of this or too little of that; My culture is juuust riiiight.
• The people whose culture is attributed to the environment are being seen as more subject to environmental forces and less able to control nature. In other words, environmental determinism is always really a statement that the enviroment determines whether a society is primitive or civilized.

Boasian cultural determinism and the environment

The environment can impose some constraints

• Samburu people and Maasai people will not become fishermen or whale hunters

Mostly, however, culture determines how people adapt to the environment in which they live.

• Two cultures adapt to the same environment in different ways
  • Hopi and Navajo (Lowie 1917, 50–51)
• Environmental constraints can be overcome by a variety of social (not just technological) means
  • Tubetube island in Papua New Guinea (Macintyre 1980)

People need natural resources to live, but culture determines what parts of nature they need

For instance, ʻwateya yam cultivation in Auhelawa is managed the way Samburu manage herds

• People reap bountiful ʻwateya harvests but avoid eating as much of it as possible; they don’t even want their neighbors to see yam peelings in the trash around the time of harvest.

• The biggest and best ʻwateya are reserved as gifts to others.

• ʻWateya suitable as seeds are sorted into piles, one for each child in a family (representing the inheritance they will receive years in the future) and then replanted in a new garden.

As one woman gardener told me, My family’s ʻwateya harvest is a bank, meaning it represents the balance of her family’s wealth.

Why ʻwateya? Surely there is some practical reason for this yam species and not another yam species. Well…

When I suggested giving halutu as a gift, or asked why halutu wasn’t stocked and stored like ʻwateya, people thought I was dumb. Halutu is another species of yam.

20 kilometers away, it’s the reverse. In communities in the north of the island halutu is preserved and carefully managed and ʻwateya is a lesser crop.

• Auhelawa people would say in response to a question about why others respect halutu, “That’s them, their custom” (i.e. To each [community] their own [culture]) or “Dalava ehebo ehebo adi kastam vagana vagana” (Each village has its own culture).
• Auhelawa oral history indicates that people adopted halutu when neighbors from these regions married into Auhelawa and came to live there.

There are many different types of adaptation

Foraging or “hunting and gathering”

Based on the collection of wild foods and game (fish and meat).

Pastoralism

Based on the tending of herds of domesticated animals, e.g. cows, reindeer, sheep, camels, yaks.

Horticulture

The cultivation of several different food crops in small plots and usually using simple hand tools.

And one more…

Agriculture

Agriculture is often distinguished from horticulture by the size and scale of production, thanks to the use of specialized steel tools and draught animals, if not machines. That’s true, but really it’s a change in the social organization not the technology.

• Peasant agriculture is a mixed type in which families produce their own food, and sell surpluses of commodity crops.
• Industrialized agriculture is the intensive production of commodity crops like rice, corn, wheat specifically for sale and usually for use in the industrial manufacture of food.
• Peasants are partly integrated into a market economy and specialized division of labor. Industrial farms feed people in societies with a complex division of labor, and today, capitalist, market economies

See Eriksen (2015, 255–56) for more information.

What do you think about these statements?

Samburu people are pastoralists.

Auhelawa people are horticulturalists.

What do you think?

Do you think that this tells you something important about the differences in their ways of life and their livelihoods?

• Make a note of your thoughts right now.

How do anthropologists use these kinds of categories to understand actual cultures?

Having a name for something is not the same as understanding it holistically.

At best, anthropologists use these terms descriptively. They are ideal types that help us see important elements in particular cases, but never perfectly apply to a single case.

Are these types of adaptation absolute?

No, most societies are a mix of all of them. We can say that one type dominates, but it does not mean it excludes other possibilities

All of these types have fuzzy boundaries anyway, so we can never be absolutely sure whether a society is primarily based on one type or not.

The difference between horticulture and agriculture is supposedly technological, but it really is marked by a change in the social system

Technology determines some things, but not everything

We must be wary of technological determinism too.

• Consider that hunting in some form often exists in societies dominated by another type of adaptation. What is different is not the technology, but the position it occupies in the whole culture.
• Consider the adoption of the technology of the horse and the snowmobile among indigenous societies of the Americas.

Is this diversity evidence of progress?

No, just because one kind of adaptation seems to involve more technology, it is not necessarily better or more modern.

• Samburu people have foraging neighbors, who appear to have gone backward from an ethnocentric perspective, but still trade forest products with Samburu for cattle products.

These terms are not ranked. One is not more advanced than another, and one does not necessarily lead to another over time.

When we classify people in this way, there are risks and benefits

• The benefits are that we can actually escape for simple judgments about primitive and civilized societies when we use precise terms.
  • Pastoralism isn’t necessarily more advanced than horticulture; both are different uses of the environment.
  • Something important happens when people become sedentary but sedentarism is not caused by a technological innovation.

Closer to nature?

Contradictory stereotypes of foragers

• They’re starving; and they have a naturally healthy diet
• They forage and hunt because they don’t know how to do anything else; and they are in harmony with nature

The West’s favorite prop for any debate about life

• Hunter-gatherers are “our contemporary ancestors” (Some anthropologists say this about every indigenous society; viz. Chagnon (1983, 214)).

In other words, some people are closer to nature, to human nature, and to human origins.

Why do people want to believe that foragers are closer to nature?

On the one hand it is true that for about 90–95% of human history, people lived in small, mobile societies and foraged, hunted, and gathered. Sedentary horticulture is very recent.

On the other hand, it is not true that some lucky people suddenly learned how to grow crops and said, hey, let’s become sedentary and eat potatoes forever.

If we define foragers negatively, i.e. people who don’t grow crops, we assume they lack something they need. Foraging societies can be very different from each other, and highly adaptable.

Utility

There is a theory of human life which starts from the position that all people are rational maximizers of utility.

• People always perform means–ends calculations on every choice
• Everything has a utility. People want different things, but they can figure out how useful each thing is for them and compare them

If a foraging society learned they could produce more calories staying in one place growing potatoes, then, they should stop doing foraging and start doing potato-growing, right?

Utility maximization supports a theory of technological progress

The theory that all people are rational actors leads to the idea that life is a series of practical problems and people are always trying to solve them in more efficient ways.

There is another practical solution to subsistence

According to Sahlins ([1972] 2017), foraging societies follow a “Zen road to affluence” [p. 2]

Rather than worry about how to meet unlimited needs with few means, they decide to define their needs differently and find that their means are more than enough.

From the outside, foragers appear to be poor because they lack the things that observers have.

But foragers tend to work less hours, and are still well fed and (except for epidemics introduced by foreigners) have historically had long lives.

People do seek practical solutions, but that doesn’t mean every technology is always an improvement

• Foragers do adopt new technologies, but usually to become better at foraging

• Judgments about the level of technological progress are often biased

  • Ester Boserup: female farming systems and male farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa (Boserup [1970] 2007)
  • The move from female systems to male systems deprived women of power, and confined them to the domestic household

The move to sedentary horticulture may have social causes, not practical ones

Foraging enables personal autonomy

Sahlins suggests that many societies that embrace foraging also have a set of associated cultural norms

• Being wealthy is not worth it, because everyone should be equal.
• Having a lot or having a little is luck you should share with others.

These norms make foraging valuable because it is functionally linked to a valued lifestyle of autonomy even if it means you don’t produce or acquire more than you need.

Sedentary horticulture and agriculture (and pastoralism, in other ways) is geared to producing more than what is needed but means a lot more work

Sedentary horticulturalists can produce greater quantities of a few domestic crops, and generally far more than anyone needs or could even eat.

Sahlins argues that the impetus to adopt this technology—and give up foraging its knowledge and its technology—was social in origin

• Many sedentary horticulturalists use their food surpluses as gifts and tributes in large feasts
• They adopt a mode of subsistence in which they always need to work more, not to eat well, but to participate in social institutions that serve a political purpose
  • Auhelawa yam growing has historically been aimed at having the biggest yam harvests, and to organize the yam harvests of many people, to host huge feasts in which leaders could say “I am capable of anything” because they can feed anyone who comes to the feast. These feasts involve hundreds of people from across the island, building the “fame” of the hosts as rich people with wide social networks.

Bonus question: Is life rational?

Where does it make sense to assume that people make means–ends calculations to decide what to do?

This question has an answer that Ryan thinks is “right,” but the question is highly debatable. You can answer this question multiple times, and think about why you might choose one answer over another.

To answer:

• Visit this page: https://www.menti.com/alx92xc2j5mh.

• Or, go to https://menti.com and use the code 7155 3730.

Notes for tutorial

For centuries, many societies have hunted whales. In fact, prior to the discovery of petroleum, whale blubber was a valuable fuel source and now many whale species are endangered. Whaling today is tightly regulated by international treaties that restrict how many whales can be killed. Even Indigenous communities in northern North America which hunt whales for food obey these limits.

Makah, an Indigenous community of Washington State in the United States, won the right to carry out ceremonial whale hunts in 1999 and people of the community have occasionally hunted whales since then, subject to approval by the US federal government which regulates whaling as part of its treaty obligations.

Whenever Makah people hunt a whale, some activists denounce them. In 2025, the Makah tribal government applied for permission to exercise their right to hunt a whale, and Sea Shepherd, an offshoot of Greenpeace, known for direct action to stop whaling campaigned to stop it. In a web site calling for support, they said,

This hunt is not necessary, not humane, and not supported by current science.

and

[Makah people] survived and evolved—like all cultures do—without taking another whale [since the 1920s].

They note that in a previous ceremonial hunt, only some Makah families received any meat or blubber.

In other words, Makah shouldn’t hunt whales because they don’t need the whales for food. They don’t need the whales, because their culture has new technology now, and people’s lives have changed.

Members of the public who submitted comments¹ went even further:

• “[A]s far as I’m concerned, the Makahs can go to Costco, buy some wild caught sockeye and call it a day.”

• “[Makah people should] Evolve and make a new tradition instead of honoring these incredible Mammals on the planet not killing them[.] in the sake of the ‘Old Ways’ make ‘New Ways.’” (This writer also complained that Makah restaurants served “whale burgers” in 1999, after that year’s sole hunt.)

• “The cultural use, as a food source, has passed. […] We have moved on from killing these magnificent beings, we get meat for survival from the supermarkets or other retail entities”

One person said he approved, but with a condition:

• “[T]he tribe needs to use the weapons and boats available at the time of the treaty signing. Allowing the tribe to use modern boats with motors and high power harpoons is not within the spirit of the treaty!”

(Hmmm, I don’t think he’s being very serious.)

One person summed up what all the opponents were thinking:

• “The Makah do not need whale meat to survive.”

Many commentators recognized that Makah society had a right to exist as a distinct way of life. One opponent even acknowledged that she was living on the unceded land of another Indigenous Washington community.

But many people also think that everyone’s way of life ultimately serves the same practical purposes, to meet individuals’ practical needs to eat. And they conclude that if another way of life meets people’s needs better then they will naturally switch to that. Some people even implied that everyone should be shopping at Costco to meet basic needs, because Costco is better than any other way to obtain food—hunting, raising animals, or planting vegetables.

This way of thinking goes back a long way. It is another one of the implicit ethnocentric assumptions about human diversity that cultural anthropology has always sought to challenge.

In this week, we discuss the ways that anthropology challenges the utilitarian perspective. This perspective leads people to conclude that societies evolve from simple to complex and from primitive to civilized and anthropology opposes this evolutionary thinking.

Possible discussion activities for tutorial

1. In your weekly writing assignment, you identified several facts from Holtzman’s ethnography (2009) that illustrate the distinction between edible and inedible things. In small groups, discuss what you wrote. What is edible for you but not edible for someone else?

2. One of the members of the public who commented on the Makah application for permission wrote at length to express his opposition and raised several points. See https://www.regulations.gov/comment/NOAA-NMFS-2025-0025-0379.

   He says, among other things, “[T]radition alone cannot justify actions that are no longer aligned with current environmental realities or survival needs” (para. 4)

   Read this comment in full and write a response in the voice of a cultural anthropologist. Exchange papers in small groups or pairs. Discuss your reactions to the comment.

Keywords

utilitarianism, evolutionism, environmental determinism, modes of subsistence: foraging, pastoralism, horticulture, agriculture

Learning outcomes

• Be able to explain the ethnocentric assumptions that inform beliefs about technology and technological progress
• Understand why anthropologists’ ideas undermine utilitarian interpretations of behavior

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1. See https://www.regulations.gov/document/NOAA-NMFS-2025-0025-0001/comment.↩︎