exploited including technology and economic organization....”(Hatch, 1973:114-
115). Steward regarded the ecology as important causal factor behind social
institution and culture can be explained in terms of ecological adaptation. He believes
that the ecological approach is highly applicable to relatively primitive communities
and less applicable to complex societies with a sophisticated technology enjoys
greater freedom from environmental limitations.
“The ecological approach attempts to achieve a more exact specification of the
relation between selected human activities, biological transactions, and physical
process by including them within a single analytical system, an ecosystem” Geertz
(1963:3). Moreover, “...in ecological terms, the most distinctive characteristics of
shifting cultivation is that it is integrated into and, when genuinely adaptive, maintain
general structure of the pre existing natural ecosystem into which it is projected,
rather than creating and sustaining one organized along novel lines and displaying
novel dynamics” (1963:16). Ecological system is the constant interplay between
culture, biology, and environment. His concept focuses on complete set of mutual
causality that is between human beings, plants, and animals along with non living
environment.
To see the relationship between human and environment in the context of
development, political ecological theory also emerged during the 1960s-70 as the
fourth approach of cultural ecological anthropology. This concept links the ecological
issues to social and political process which operate at all geographical scales. The
concept of political ecology is also linked to political economy. Political ecology
came from a realization that ecological process is integrated into the social system and
could not be understand outside the contexts of local productive relations and wider
economic system. Marxian political economy offered an insight of causal
explanations for ecological transformation that stress to social and historical factors
shaping relation between land use and their environment.
2.4 Land Tenure System in Nepal and Shifting Cultivation
A tenure system can be defined as the relationship between different social elements
of research population with respect to scarce natural resources such as land and water.
“Land tenure system [is] extremely complicated. [It] includes mythology, kinship,
marriage, religion, rank, law, social grouping, history, and economics. Tenure systems
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