Ecology, Kinship, and Social Structure -- From Papa New Guinea to the Mountains of the Alps

Of course, an anthropologist can never entirely separate the delicate relationship that exists between ecology, kinship, and social structure within any given society or community. Family, food, and environment are the key building blocks that produce a culture. The language of food's abundance can create an entire symbolic system of need, dependence, and social uncertainty, when deployed within a particular, uncertain system and environment of kinship and social structure, as noted in Miriam Kahn's text regarding Wamiran attitudes towards sustenance in Papua New Guinea. The mere mile separating two Alpine villages, thousands of leagues away from New Guinea, can also prove equally formative as the relationship of kinship and food to the individuals chronicled by John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf in their classic anthropological text The Hidden Frontier. In these two villages,...
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