Introduction

Integrating economic and political perspectives for the purposes of understanding daily life in human ecosystems produces particular methodological challenges for researchers. Many levels of analysis (e.g., individual, group, and other levels of social organization) and many units of analysis (e.g., behaviors, strategies, linguistic status/rank markers) may be present in any given study, and standard procedures for examining the political economy of environment are not common. Ecological economics provides a number of standardized analytical approaches, but does not typically address the daily life of individuals, households, and communities, nor does it try to understand “why societies are the way they are” in ecological contexts. “Why societies are the way they are” (whether at micro or macro levels) requires adding the analysis of power; thus, I wanted to conceive of this anthropological approach to economy and ecology as the political economy of environment.

For our purposes, the term political economy is intended to conceptualize how human populations create social order through economic production, political prestige, and ideology (Blanton et al. 1996). More specifically, it is largely a top-down approach that assumes that elites generally attempt to maintain power at any level of political organization. To do so, they focus on some aspect of economic production for which they can control scarcity and value through taxation, storage, access, or production. Often this scarcity involves environmental inputs, such as the mining of precious stones or the storage of grain. Accompanying this economic focus should be a coherent mode of garnering prestige such as via foreign dignitaries or via access to the divine by a god-king. This prestige assures processes of political continuity (e.g., continued recognition by foreign powers of a state’s leaders even if they change). Finally, there will also exist a common or dominant ideology that indicates where allegiance and devotion should be directed, such as the tribal focus on kin or a state’s focus on gods. These practices are integrated into the daily life of commoners and are also reversely shaped by them. This allegiance helps structure access to productive resources, such as land and other natural resources.