Materialism, Cultural

Societies survive and successfully reproduce themselves only insofar as they meet the elementary material needs of a certain minimum of their members. This observation is the starting point for cultural materialism, a living theoretical tradition founded and defined by the American anthropologist Marvin Harris (1927–2001). Of cardinal importance, in Harris's view, is the fact that people pursue their needs in the context of intimate dependence on the natural environs for their energy requirements. It follows that we may expect the most important causes of the similarities and differences between societies to arise at the sites where humans maintain their most immediate commerce with the natural world. The realms of demography, technology, and economy best answer to this description. Of all sociocultural realms, these are also those most subject to law-like regularities and therefore to scientific investigation. Harris draws the conclusion that if anthropology is ever to rescue itself from the siren calls of various fashionable idealisms, and if it is one day to reclaim itself as a science, then it will be to these “material” aspects of society and culture that it will turn.

Impressively wide ranging, in the hands of Harris and other adepts, cultural materialism has been able to offer empirically informed but connected theorizations concerning an apparently unlimited number of cultural processes and historical periods. The source of food taboos; the origins of egalitarianism in many band societies; causes of the variety of kinship systems; why the Oedipus complex is an expression of aggressive male competition; why beef has been central to U.S. meat consumption; the reasons for the demise of the U.S.S.R.; the role of Haitian peasant voodoo in resource circulation; the origins of the state, war, and capitalism—these and many other social scientific questions have been opened up anew under the confident cultural materialist pen. At the same time, the explanatory power of the theory has been tested against virtually any contending school of thought one cares to name. Needless to say, for its adherents it has not been found wanting in these encounters.

Although cultural materialists seem to have a rather embattled view of themselves, they are not so alone as all that. In fact, they float on a broad if turbulent intellectual stream within modern anthropology. The focus they put on evolutionary dynamics was a hallmark of anthropology's founding fathers and later of Leslie White (1900–1975). The tacit functionalism of cultural materialism was prefigured in the work of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), and the emphasis on scientificity by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955). Cultural materialism's stress on ecological influences had been taken a long way by Julian Steward (1902–1972), and a concern with history and material culture marked the work of Eleanor Burke Leacock (1922–1987). In the1960s and 1970s, when Harris was writing programmatic works like The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968) and Cultural Materialism (1979), Marxism was a significant force in Western academies. Broader still are the utilitarian, materialist, empiricist, and behaviorist currents that are component parts of much Western common sense, not to speak already of the great prestige of Darwinism. Cultural materialism conscientiously distinguishes itself from each of these trends and viewpoints, but would have been inconceivable without them.

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