Ethnic Ecology

Ethnic ecology studies how certain ethnic groups interact with their habitat through the process of making cultural landscapes. Ethnicity has a close link to cultural ecology as much as folk cultures do, and a strong correlation exists between people and physical environment in ethnic culture regions, in ethnic migration, and in survival of ethnic groups. Ethnic groups are occasionally created in a remote place from their source region. This is often caused by migration and/or relocation diffusion. Since those groups settled in distance, cultural preadaptation must be considered as an ecological element. 

Preadaptation is a process based on a collection of adaptive traits, such as behaviors, ideas, and practices, possessed by a group prior to migration. This ability gives them the chance to survive in the new environment after migration or relocation diffusion. Preadaptation mostly occurs in groups migrating to an environmentally similar place to their original home, and the adaptive strategy from their source region should work effectively in the new destination.

Environmental perception of the new land is another key to understanding ethnic ecology. There is a general tendency for immigrants to unconsciously associate their new home with their abandoned homeland, thus finding the new home more similar to their original home than reality. In other words, they emphasize the similarities and minimize the differences between old and new homes, and this perception often causes some extent of distortion.

This perceptional process occasionally caused problems for ethnic farming groups, particularly early Western European immigrants to Americas. Sometimes crops that thrived well in the old homeland were not adaptive to the particular American environmental setting. This collapse in agriculture and farming resulted in economic breakdown, and it is often the case that the ethnic settlement was deserted. This result can be referred as an example of cultural maladaptation.