Cultural Materialism

Four Epistemological Procedures

• 1) Emic mental: what people think about their own thoughts • 2) Emic behavioral: what people think about their own behavior • 3) Etic behavioral: what an observer observes about others' behavior • 4) Etic Mental: what an observe observes about others' thoughts • All are possible but two are problematic.

Cultural Materialism

• Central Problem: • People are both subjects and objects of scientific study. • Where then does true knowledge reside? • Views environmental, technological, and economic factors as the most powerful and pervasive determinants of human behavior. • Favoring his etic behavioral dimension; focused on the objectively observable behaviors of any culture.

Epistemological Perspectives

• Emic behavioral: people develop false consciousness and misrepresent the meaning of their behavior • Etic mental: difficult to find out and observe what is going on in someone's head. • Harris allows for both emic and etic views but believes as fields of inquiry they must be kept separate; and that ultimately the etic perspective will dominate.

Eric vs Emic

• Emic: the ultimate judge is the native informant • Etic: the ultimate judge is the objective scientist. • Native informants can be objective but when they are they become scientists. • There is only one truth; the etic truth of science. • Using these ideas Harris proposed his own universal pattern of culture.

Sacred Cows

• First Harris argues that the taboos on cow slaughter (Emic mental) were superstructural elements resulting from the need to use cows as draft animals and not as food. • Harris observed that farmers claim that no calves die as cows are sacred • In-fact male calves often starved to death when feed supplies were low • Harris argues the scarcity of feed (infrastructural change) shaped ideological (superstructural) beliefs of the farmers. • Thus Harris showed how using empirical methods an etic perspective is essential to understand a culture change holistically.

Infrastructure

• Food, shelter, reproduction, and health • Mediates a culture's interactions with the natural and social environment through: • Mode of production - technology, practices, and social relations used in basic subsistence production • Mode of reproduction - technology, practices, and social relations used to expand, limit, and maintain population.

Cultural Materialists

• Harris used three fundamental concepts in his approach: • Infrastructure • Structure • Superstructure • At the core of this approach is infrastructural determinism.

Principle of Infrastructural Determinism

• Human society strives to meet the needs most important to the survival and well-being of human individuals (sex, sleep, nutrition, and shelter). • The infrastructure determines the rest of the sociocultural system.

Marvin Harris 1927-2001

• MA/Phd Columbia University • Faculty Columbia • University of Florida (1981-2000) • Was primarily focused on re-orienting anthropology toward scientific inquiry using sound scientific data collection and analysis. • In his terms "to purge anthropology of Boas"

Structure

• Made up of interpersonal relationships that emerge as behavior. • Domestic economy - organization of reproduction and production, exchange, and consumption within domestic settings. • Political economy - organization of reproduction, production, exchange, and consumption within and between bands, villages, chiefdoms, states, and empires.

Harris' Cultural Materialism in application

• Marvin Harris: Cows, Wars, Pigs and Witches (1979). • Thesis: no element of culture persists without reasons • These reasons usually have to do with class, economic and ecological structures. • Used a cultural materialist model to examine Hindu belief that cows are sacred and must not be killed.

Harris says we can explore both through two domains:

• Mental Domain • Emic • What we think • Participant based • Behavioral Domain • Etic • What we do • Observer based

Superstructure

• Refers to a society's values, aesthetics, rules, beliefs, religions, and symbols which can be behaviorally manifested as art, music, dance, literature, advertising, religious rituals, sports, games, hobbies, and even science.

The "sacred cow" of India

• The cow has been sacred for approx. 2,000 yrs. • Only "untouchables" butcher or eat cows; cow- killing produces an even more powerful reaction than murder. • Most Indian food is cooked in butter-fat • Nearly 100,000,000 foraging cows are everywhere. • Even cow dung is used and is treated as pure

Women's Roles in Post-WWII USA

• Work of Maxine Margolis (using CM approach) • 1950's was a time when ideology held that the duties of women should be located in the home (emic mental) • Empirically it was observed that women were entering the workforce in large numbers (etic behavioral) • This was economically necessary as it increased productive and reproductive capabilities in households. (infrastructural, mode of reproduction) • Further; the ideological movement of "feminism" did not cause the increase in the female workforce but was the result of the increase. (Superstructural response to infrastructural change).