Contextualizing Culture and Ecology in the Changing Dynamics of Native American Life: A Reading of Select Texts of Louise Erdrich

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Porishmita Buragohain , Rituranjan Gogoi

Abstract

Human responses to environment are determined by language, culture, practices and values. Cultures have profound impacts on human perception that is why our environment is shaped by our cultural assumptions or cultural interpretations. Culture, again can also be interpreted in terms of its physical environment. This relation between culture and ecology has been one of the important subjects of discourse for the anthropologists and sociologists to come up with ‘cultural ecology’, a term coined by American Anthropologist Julian Steward. This paper is an attempt to understand the relationship between culture and ecology in the platform of rapid changes that the Native people of America have gone through. This relation would definitely help in bridging the gap between past and present, ancient and modern, as culture is instrumental in connecting human beings to its roots. In terms of Native American life and culture, ecology plays a very crucial role, and, this paper offers the possibility of understanding culture in relation to ecology or vice versa. This study is an attempt to observe the changes because of the intervention of modernity, yet reviving and bringing back the lost cultural ethos through a structural pattern with special reference to Louise Erdrich’s works.

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