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THE ENVIRONMENT AND ANTHROPOLOGY 113
to identify the social forces which motivate people to cause the changes being studied.
This also is primarily a concern for the social sciences. - How could changes, processes
that are unacceptable from the perspective of sustainability, be prevented, stopped,
changed? To answer this question, scientific, technological and social scientific knowledge
is always required” (Kiss 2012: 17).
Environment: “It is the landscape surrounding living beings, the complex system of
the terrestrial domains of animate (biosphere) and inanimate elements (atmosphere,
soil, water surface). The living world and its environment are in permanent interaction
through the exchange of energy and matter. The natural environment is complemented
by artificial or built (man-made) environments” (E. Mészaros 2010: 147).
Nature: “Representatives of diverse fields of scholarship, the laity - and most probably
the readers of this book as well - differ in their understanding of nature. To put it
differently, the concept of nature is a “construction”, the content of which may differ
among individuals, groups and cultures. Seen through the perspective of an ecologist,
nature and the natural environment are taken to mean the elements of the surrounding
world that were not made by humans and that appear at different levels of organization
(e.g., a sapling, a tree, an urban park, a forest, a wetland habitat or a landscape composed
of several habitats” (Mihôk et al. 2021: 18).
Natural environment: “The natural environment consists of elements of nature. For
the characterization of an environment, it is useful to further divide it into natural
environment, tended natural environment and cultivated environment. — The natural
environment is what results from a lack of human intervention. This can be a jungle,
an intact coastline, anything with which humans have not interfered. — A tended
environment also comprises natural elements but humans have also contributed to its
emergence. — A cultivated environment is composed entirely of artificially created
natural elements” (Kiss 2012: 11-12).
The relationship between humanity and nature has always constituted one of the
central interests of anthropological research. One of the basic questions of these
studies has been the extent to which the natural environment determines culture.
The determinist view says it is fully determined by it, while possibilism proposes
that it provides only the frames and possibilities for culture.
Environmental determinism appeared in human thought fairly early on,
including Hippocrates’s humoral theory, Plato’s and Aristotle’s views of the forms
of governance and Montesquieu’s theory on the emergence of religions.’ Both
ethnography and anthropology were deeply influenced by the work of Friedrich
Ratzel (1982). He established the fundamentals of the discipline of
In the view of Hippocrates, the character of a person is determined by the humors in the body.
These depend on the climate, so eventually climate influences the character of a person. Plato and
Aristotle were of the opinion that the moderate form of governance, democracy (see Greece) is
caused by the temperate climate, and the hot/tropical climate is the source of dictatorship.
Montesquieu thought that a warm climate was behind passive religions, while in a cold climate,
religions become aggressive. Summarized: Borsos 2004: 27.