[2] Rappaport's work demonstrates the correlation between a culture and its economy, with ritual invariably occupying a central role.

The research comes from his fieldwork and time spent with the Maring tribe of Papua New Guinea, who lacked hereditary chiefs or officials.

Instead of treating whole cultures as separate units, Rappaport focused "on populations in the ecological sense, that is, as one of the components of a system of trophic exchanges taking place within a bounded area."

An ecosystem is a system of matter and energy transactions among unlike populations or organisms and between them and the non-living substances by which they are surrounded.

Herds of pigs were maintained and fattened until the required work load pushed the limits of the tribe's carrying capacity, in which case the slaughter began.

Rappaport showed that this ritual served several important purposes, such as restoring the ratio of pigs to humans, supplying the local communities with pork, and preventing land degradation.

The victorious Maring tribe would plant it on a designated area to mark the end of fighting, and the beginning of the slaughter.

The shrub remained until the next slaughter was initiated, once the pig to human ratio became overwhelming due to competition for resources.

Rappaport developed as a well-respected contributor to the field and its subsequent discourse by the coinage and adaptation of new anthropological concepts.

The operational model on the other hand, is one "which the anthropologist constructs through observation and measurement of empirical entities, events and material relationships.

He takes this model to represent for analytic purposes, the physical world of the group he is studying.... as far as actors are concerned, it has no function," Rappaport explains (Wolf, 1999, 19).

White fishermen may consider the spill an economic loss; however, for a Native American tribe, the damage would be far more devastating to their subsistence lifestyle.