Harris, Marvin (1927–2001)

The Rise of Anthropological Theory

The impact of Marvin Harris's ideas can be gauged from his1968 magnum opus, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, an overview of anthropological theory from the perspective of cultural materialism. Harris introduced the term cultural materialism in this volume—“the Rat,” as it is known to three generations of anthropology students. The book's contribution to anthropological theory was highlighted in 1991, when both the Social Science Citation Index and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index named it a “citation classic.”

In the book, Harris argued that previous social theorists had never developed an entirely satisfactory materialist and nomothetic(generalizing) research strategy dedicated to explaining the evolution of sociocultural differences and similarities. As such, the yardstick he used to evaluate specific theories and schools of thought was the degree to which they aided an understanding of and provided explanations for cross-cultural variation.

The Rat is truly a history of anthropological theory. Through the lens of cultural materialism, it analyzes individual theories and schools of thought [Page 1142]from the 18th century through the1960s. It begins with the Enlightenment, the era Harris identifies as the one in which naturalistic causal explanations of cultural phenomena were first established, a modern conception of culture began to evolve, and materialist explanations of cultural similarities and differences first appeared. Harris explores the subsequent reaction against naturalism and materialism in the early19th century and their eventual replacement by hard-core biological determinism that, with the notable exception of Marxist materialism, held sway over anthropological theory into the early 20th century. Franz Boas and his followers rescued anthropology from biological reductionism only to replace it with an idiographic strategy that, from Harris's perspective, did little to advance anthropology as a scientific enterprise.

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