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How do human societies interact with their environments, and why do those interactions vary so dramatically across time and space? Environmental anthropology has grappled with this question through a series of competing and overlapping frameworks, each offering different answers about what drives environmental behavior, how to study it, and whose perspectives should count.
The subfield's first major frameworks emerged from a shared commitment to materialist explanation—the idea that environmental relations are shaped by tangible, measurable forces such as energy flow, population pressure, and subsistence strategies.
Cultural Ecology, developed in the 1930s–1960s by Julian Steward, focused on the relationship between a society's subsistence practices and its social organization. Steward argued that similar environments often produce similar cultural features, a concept he called the "cultural core"—the set of activities most closely tied to resource use. Cultural Ecology treated each society as adapting to its local habitat, but it largely avoided grand evolutionary schemes, preferring detailed case studies of particular groups.
Neoevolutionism, in the 1950s–1970s, drew on Cultural Ecology's insights but launched a more ambitious project. Thinkers like Leslie White and Marshall Sahlins proposed that societies evolve through stages defined by increasing energy capture (White) or by the efficiency of subsistence strategies (Sahlins). Neoevolutionism coexisted with Cultural Ecology by pushing toward cross-cultural comparison and universal stages, whereas Cultural Ecology favored local specificity. The tension between these two frameworks—generalizing vs. particularizing explanations—remained unresolved within the materialist tradition.
Cultural Materialism, which emerged in the 1960s–1980s under Marvin Harris, absorbed and narrowed the materialist agenda. Harris argued that all societies are shaped by an "infrastructure" of material conditions (population, technology, environment), which in turn determines "structure" (social organization) and "superstructure" (beliefs and values). Cultural Materialism explicitly rejected the possibility that ideas could drive social change, positioning itself as a science of human behavior grounded in observable, material causes. This framework directly competed with Cultural Ecology's more flexible approach: where Steward saw adaptation as a historically contingent process, Harris insisted on deterministic causal laws. Neoevolutionism's universal stages were largely discarded by Cultural Materialists in favor of a single explanatory model applicable to all societies.
By the 1970s and 1980s, dissatisfaction with materialism's neglect of meaning, power, and history gave rise to two new frameworks that developed largely in parallel, though with different emphases.
Symbolic Anthropology (1980–2000) shifted attention away from material conditions and toward how people understand and represent their environments. Influenced by Clifford Geertz, symbolic anthropologists analyzed rituals, myths, and classifications as systems of meaning that mediate human-environment relationships. For instance, the Hindu reverence for cows was not, as Harris argued, an adaptive response to ecological pressures, but a cultural symbol that could only be understood on its own terms. Symbolic Anthropology coexisted with lingering materialist frameworks by carving out a separate domain: explaining meaning, not predicting behavior. It did not so much replace materialism as render it incomplete, arguing that materialist explanations missed the interpretative dimension of environmental knowledge.
Political Ecology (1980–present) took a different direction. Rather than focusing on meaning, it examined how power, inequality, and political economy shape environmental access, degradation, and knowledge. Drawing on Marxist and postcolonial thought, political ecologists argued that environmental crises—such as deforestation in the Amazon or desertification in Africa—are not simply the result of mismanagement or overpopulation but are produced by global capitalism, colonial histories, and uneven power relations. Where Cultural Materialism had treated infrastructure as purely technical, Political Ecology revealed infrastructure as political. This framework absorbed the materialist concern with resources and production but transformed it by adding attention to power. Unlike Symbolic Anthropology, Political Ecology retained a critical edge, aiming not just to interpret but to expose and contest environmental injustice.
The relationship between Symbolic Anthropology and Political Ecology has been one of coexistence rather than direct competition. Both emerged from dissatisfaction with materialism, but they pursued different questions: the meaning of environmental categories versus the politics of environmental access. In practice, many environmental anthropologists today borrow from both, analyzing how power relations are naturalized through symbolic systems.
Since the 2000s, two further frameworks have pushed the subfield to question its own foundations: the authority of the researcher, the nature of existence, and the legacy of colonialism.
Decolonial Anthropology (2000–present) insists that environmental anthropology must reckon with its origins in colonial science. Critics argue that earlier frameworks—including Political Ecology—often reproduced Western categories (e.g., "nature," "resource," "conservation") as if they were universal, while marginalizing Indigenous and local knowledge systems. Decolonial scholars advocate for epistemic justice: treating Indigenous environmental knowledge as a valid alternative to Western science, not merely as data to be incorporated into Western frameworks. This framework directly challenges the universalizing ambitions of Cultural Materialism and Neoevolutionism, which had assumed a single standard of rationality. Decolonial Anthropology does not aim to replace all earlier approaches but to transform the field by shifting who speaks and what counts as authoritative knowledge.
Ontological Anthropology (2000–present) goes even further by questioning the very distinction between nature and culture. Drawing on the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ontological anthropologists argue that different societies inhabit different realities, not just different worldviews. For example, when Amazonian groups say that a jaguar is a person, they are not making a metaphorical claim; they are expressing a different ontology in which humans and animals share subjectivity. This framework insists that the observer must take seriously the possibility of multiple natures (multinaturalism) rather than imposing a single nature interpreted through diverse cultures. Ontological Anthropology has a complex relationship with Decolonial Anthropology: both critique Western assumptions, but ontological anthropologists sometimes treat ontology as a tool for theoretical innovation rather than for political decolonization. The two frameworks coexist in tension, with occasional disagreements over whether the goal is to understand other worlds or to challenge the power structures that marginalize them.
Today, Political Ecology, Decolonial Anthropology, and Ontological Anthropology are all active traditions, each with its own strengths. Political Ecology remains the dominant framework for analyzing environmental conflicts, development projects, and conservation politics. Decolonial Anthropology informs work with Indigenous communities and movements for environmental justice. Ontological Anthropology has opened new avenues for understanding human-animal relations and the political implications of divergent realities.
These frameworks broadly agree on several points: that environmental problems are never purely technical or material, that local and Indigenous knowledge matters, and that researchers must reflect on their own positionality. However, they disagree on the analytical primacy of power versus ontology. Political Ecologists tend to see ontological claims as expressions of political struggle; Ontological Anthropologists see political economy as only part of a deeper ontological difference. Decolonial scholars, meanwhile, caution that both frameworks can inadvertently reproduce colonial hierarchies if they do not center the voices of subjugated peoples. This pluralism is not a weakness; it reflects the complexity of human-environment relations and the diversity of questions that environmental anthropology seeks to answer.