Culture is defined as the strategy by which human beings adapt to the natural environment. Anthropology in all its forms is the study of human beings and their behavior, and culture is a manifestation of that behavior. Culture includes all the techniques, technologies, and artifacts produced by human beings. Culture is clearly a vital element in cultural anthropology, which studies how human beings react to their environment. In two books on different cultures, the authors take different methodological approaches to their studies, but in each case the authors show an understanding of the way the environment and all that it entails--topography, vegetation, climate--shapes the culture that develops in that environment. A comparison of the culture of the Tyrol in The Hidden Frontier by John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf and that of the Guatemalan Indians in Penny capitalism by Sol Tax shows how important environment has been in the way each culture has developed.
The geography of the Tyrol includes the Brenner pass, with the land of the tyrol rising on either side. This pass connects Austria and Italy across a narrow area 1370 meters above sea level. The area has been a unified political entity since the early thirteenth century and was divided by the Treaty of St. Germain of 1919 into the tansalpine Tyrol, one of the provinces of the Federated Austrian republic, and the cisalpine Tyrol, now part of the region of Trento-Alto Adige of the Republic of Italy. The authors note that this region has been subject to cultural influxes from both north and south. In addition, the geography itself has been influential, for the mountainous perimeter of the Tyrol has enabled this region "to cling to ecological adaptations already made, while allowing the gradual assimilation of new cultural patterns" (Cole and Wolf 25).
The authors consider the history of this region and how that history has altered the political and social landscape, b...