Julian Steward

Julian Steward was an American anthropologist who founded cultural ecology, an approach analyzing how a society's core social and economic institutions adapt to the specific environment and subsistence technology available to it. In Theory of Culture Change (1955) he proposed a theory of multilinear evolution, arguing against both the older idea of a single universal sequence of cultural stages and the opposing view that every culture's history is entirely unique, and holding instead that similar environments and technologies tend to produce recurrent, comparable patterns of social organization across otherwise unrelated societies. Steward's method of comparing societies by the specific ecological adaptations of their core institutions, developed through his own fieldwork among Great Basin peoples, shaped later ecological and evolutionary approaches in anthropology, including the cultural materialism of his student Marvin Harris.