Many years ago, in the mid-1960s, I was invited to teach for a while in Ghana, West Africa, at the School of Architecture, Kumasi University of Science and Technology. Kumasi is in the heart of the Ghanaian rain forest, and we arrived in the middle of the rainy season. All the vegetation was green and glistening. I was fascinated by this jungle environment, and by the Asante villages that were buried deep in it, often linked only by unmade tracks of compacted red earth. Exploring the forest to some extent, I was impressed by the range of ‘woody plants’, as foresters termed them, from luxuriating palm trees, to giant cottonwoods with exposed root systems like immense buttresses. There was dense undergrowth throughout, which seemed impenetrable. Wanting to know more, I spoke to an agronomist at the university about it. ‘It’s not a jungle’, he said, when I used the word; ‘it’s not even rain forest in the sense that you would find it in Nigeria or the Ivory Coast’.
I was disappointed and remarked that whatever they called it, it was primary forest. ‘No’, he said, ‘it’s not primary forest. It isn’t even secondary forest; for the most part it’s tertiary forest. And what you are looking at is Asante farms’. In other words, the original forest had been burned, felled, or utilized by distant generations to the extent that it had gone through successive transformations. But a farm? It was nothing like any farm that I knew. ‘They grow bananas, mangoes, all kinds of tropical fruits and root crops’, my agronomist friend explained. ‘But what about these immense cottonwoods?’ I argued. ‘They’ve been here for hundreds of years’. ‘Of course, they provide the canopy which protects the plants below’, he replied.
When I commented on the undergrowth he told me that ‘it shades the soil and prevents the sun from turning it into concrete’.
BUILTTOMEETNEEDS
Figure 4.1
Dense vegetation in the rain forest region of central south Ghana.
This was hard to understand, but my informant, and others includ-ing a geologist at the university, told me what generations of Asante had known and passed on to their successors: when the sun beats on the red soil it turns it into a hard crust, which cannot be cul-tivated, so it has to be shielded from the sun’s heat. ‘We argue whether laterites are soils which can behave like rock, or rock in which you can grow plants’ said the geologist, with a laugh. For me it was no laughing matter, for I realized that what I understood to be the ‘jungle environment’ was far from being a simple and gen-eralized phenomenon. Likewise, the Asante ‘tribe’ who lived there had a profoundly sophisticated understanding of its ecology and behaved accordingly, in order to nurture its growth and harvest its produce.
LEARNINGFROMASANTE(2000)
Figure 4.2
A forest farm by the coast, where trees and undergrowth protect crops. Exposed lateritic earth is infertile, but is used for the construction of houses. Ghana.
I have summarized this experience – which really changed the direction of my life – in some detail, because I had begun to learn that what I had taken to be ‘the environment’ was based on erroneous perceptions, and what I had understood to be Asante
‘behaviour’ was, in fact, a complex of collective know-how, passed on through a subtle process of cultural transmission. Since then, for decades I have regarded generalizations about the environment with discomfort, and descriptions of individual or group behaviour with scepticism. I will endeavour to enlarge on these misgivings, but first we should ascertain what is meant by these words. For guidance I turn to those standard works theOxford English Dictio-nary and Webster’s DictioDictio-nary. In these, we find that the verb ‘to environ’ means to ‘encircle’ or ‘surround’, and the ‘environment’ is
BUILTTOMEETNEEDS
that which surrounds an object or living thing: ‘whatever encom-passes’. Biologically, it is ‘the aggregate of all externaland internal (my emphasis) conditions, affecting the existence, growth, and wel-fare of organisms’. It can be argued that there is no entity that is ‘the environment’, but an infinite variety of environments for all physical phenomena. Similarly, we may discover that ‘behaviour’, while meaning for some 500 years, ‘conduct or course of action towards or to others’ has also meant for nearly as long a time, the
‘handling, or disposition ofanything’, such as the ‘manner or action of a machine, a chemical, substance, organ, organism, etc’.
If we consider what is meant by the terms used to identify persons who study these subjects we may find that a ‘behaviourist’ is one who advocates ‘behaviourism’ or the ‘theory that human behaviour and activities are the result of individual reaction to definite objec-tive stimuli or situations and not of subjecobjec-tive factors’. In other words, the theory of ‘stimulus and response’ virtually eliminates free will or motivation. As for the ‘environmentalist’ we find that this applies to one who attaches more importance to environment than heredity as a determinant in the development of a person or a group. Only the definition of ‘one who advocates preservation of the environment, as from commercial exploitation’ do we recognize the features of some who link together ‘behaviour’ and ‘environ-ment’. As far as I am aware, it was Amos Rapoport who first defined, by this name at any rate, the field of research termed ‘environment–
behaviour studies’, or EBS. It was not always so: his first book, as many readers will know, wasHouse Form and Culture. In this seminal work, he barely discussed either concept, mentioning ‘behaviour’
only four times, and ‘environment’ five (Rapoport, 1969). Neverthe-less, these gave an indication of the direction to which he would turn, as he argued that an understanding of behaviour patterns is
‘essential to the understanding of built form’ and that ‘forms, once built, affect behaviour and the way of life’. In his view the forms of vernacular buildings result from ‘the aims and desires of the unified group for an ideal environment’ and sociocultural forces ‘become of prime importance in relating man’s way of life to the environment’.
Whether the ‘ideal environment’ is indeed, an objective or, in many cultures, is even a concept, remains to be demonstrated.
Several years later, in 1976, Professor Rapoport edited the pro-ceedings of the IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences under the titleThe Mutual Interaction of Peo-ple and Their Built Environment, to which he contributed an intro-duction outlining a programme for research in the newly defined area, and a paper on ‘Socio-cultural aspects of man–environment
LEARNINGFROMASANTE(2000) studies’ (Rapoport, 1976). The following year Rapoport’s Human Aspects of Urban Form was published, subtitled ‘Towards a man–
environment approach to urban design’ (Rapoport, 1977). Some time after this, perhaps under feminist persuasion, the ‘man’ was dropped and ‘environment–behaviour studies’ replaced it. This phrase was being used in the reverse form by Robert Altman (Altman et al., 1980), Roger Downs, David Stea (Downs and Stea, 1973) and others, as ‘behaviour–environment’ research, but the other came into broader currency. Clearly, the meaning of the words has been made to fit a more unified usage, although a precise definition remains curiously elusive. The field of study was soon narrowed still further to the ‘built environment’. Even so, this term, with its uncertainty as to the nature of the ‘built’ – whether this means con-structed, enclosed, erected or simply made by mankind – has been loosely employed.
The behaviourist B.F. Skinner was the principal advocate of the theory of ‘stimulus and response’, applied to the actions of mankind (Skinner, 1953). As noted above, subjective factors are not included in this theory, though it seems to me that this position is indefensible. Intuitive, emotional and intellectual responses that inspire behaviour are all of significance. But theyare signifiers, the behaviours that we may observe are the perceptible symptoms of cultural intentions and meanings that may be obscured, because they are based on shared understandings that are not necessarily articulated. In fact, all societies develop codified behaviour pat-terns that are formed to conceal behavioural impulses. We used to speak of ‘manners’, ‘comportment’, ‘good conduct’ – being sanc-tioned cultural, rather than individual, behaviours that symbolized, solemnized or simply screened more profound meanings. A curious aspect of this is our tendency to project our behaviourson the envi-ronment: we talk of ‘the hostile desert’, ‘the cruel sea’, the ‘peaceful valley’, the ‘noble mountain’, of being ‘in the teeth of the gale’ and innumerable other figures of speech which we employ as we try to humanize the world around us. But the environment has no moti-vations, no intentions, no impulses: the environment that surrounds any phenomenon is neutral; it is we who personalize it and often obscure its nature by our romantic projections.
In the commonly employed term, a society often seeks to ‘tame’
the environment, behaving to the environment as it does to its members. By mutual agreement or by authority, a society may con-trol, suppress or ‘civilize’ impulsive behaviours for the good of the community, though the customs so employed may be inscrutable to those outside the culture. I soon discovered this when I decided
BUILTTOMEETNEEDS
Figure 4.3
Asante elders including the chief (centre), the Queen Mother behind him, and theokyeame, or spokesman (with yellow staff), assembled to confer near their village.
that we should make a comparative study of a small number of Asante villages, ascertaining what generated their plans and the organization of their dwellings and their buildings of religious or hierarchical importance. To prepare for this we had to meet the chief and elders of a village and engage in prolonged explanation of our proposed study. All were men who were present, except for one elderly lady who spoke in whispers to the chief. Discussion was in subdued tones, but the dialogue with the village elders was only through a single elderly man with a golden cane – the okyeame.
We were obliged to appoint our own okyeame, but he had to be one who could speak the formal language of such dialogue (Rattray, 1927). Fortunately, one of our students was the son of just such a spokesman, and had acquired the appropriate speech patterns and terminology. I learned that in this matrilineal society the woman who whispered to the chief was his Queen Mother, who advised him on decisions. The solemn chief himself, whose features I could faintly recognize, I later realized was the clerk at my Kumasi bank by day;
their behaviours served both to obscure and to protect the cultural realities.
It was much the same with ‘the environment’, both natural and man-made, which I encountered in the bush or rain forest. There was no part of the forest that had not been felled, cultivated, coppiced, planted, cleared, quarried; no part of the village that was not con-structed inswish, moulded and thatched for designated functions of dwelling, authority or ancestor and spirit worship. The drum orches-tras that played under awnings and palm leaf shelters, or in the
LEARNINGFROMASANTE(2000) Figure 4.4
At an Asante funeral, dancers in mourning cloths mime the occupation and other activities of the deceased. Relatives watch from temporary shelters.
pato of the shrine houses were not the freely improvising musicians that I had anticipated, but well-rehearsed and organized perform-ers whose playing helped unify the complex rituals. I attended one occasion in which dancers performed exaggerated but stylized ges-tures and flowing movements; through interpreters I learned that these postures and sequences symbolized the activities and life-ways of deceased members of the community, whose spirits were recalled to the village within a specially constructed enclosure at 40-day intervals in the year. My perceptions of their behaviour and of their environment, both natural and shaped, had been superficial and it was only over an extended period of time, and with much difficulty that I began to gain a little understanding of Asante culture and its contexts.
I could continue, and would like to do so, extending my exam-ples within and beyond the Asante, to cultures in their contexts in many parts of the world. But this is essentially the issue: for me, the definition of the field of study in behaviour and environment is unclear. As I have endeavoured to show, the terms are in effect, applied to external appearances, and as such are only symptomatic of the much more fundamental bases of culture and context. It can be argued of course, that these are simply alternative words for the same concepts, but I believe that culture in all its complex-ity lies beyond ‘behaviour’, which often even seeks to obscure it.
Similarly, ‘environment’ summarizes the physical surroundings of a phenomenon which may have other, more profound implications in time, condition, cultural expression, and other varied contexts, than
BUILTTOMEETNEEDS
the word suggests. Culture and context, I believe, bear upon study and research in buildings, and in particular, on the vernacular archi-tecture which constitutes the overwhelming majority of mankind’s structures.
References
Altman, I., Rapoport, A. and Wohlwill, J.F. (eds). (1980).Environment and Culture. New York: Plenum Publishing.
Downs, R.M. and Stea, D. (eds). (1976).Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior. Chicago: Aldine Publishing.
Rapoport, A. (1969).House Form and Culture. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Rapoport, A. (ed.). (1976).The Mutual Interaction of People and Their Built Environment. The Hague: Mouton Editions.
Rapoport, A. (1977). Human Aspects of Urban Form: Towards a Man–
Environment Approach to Urban Form and Design. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Rattray, R.S. (1927).Religion and Art in Ashanti. Oxford University Press.
Skinner, B.F. (1953).Science and Human Behaviour. New York: MacMillan.