Summary
Cultural materialism is the anthropologist Marvin Harris’s theory that a society’s material conditions do most to shape the rest of its culture. He named it in 1968 and set it out in a 1979 book of that name. Harris sorts a culture into three levels: infrastructure (how people make a living from their environment, and reproduce), structure (family and political organisation) and superstructure (art, ritual, science, belief). The first, he held, largely determines the others. As his reviewer Cynthia Stokes Brown puts it, “Harris rejects the notion that ideas change the world”.
The name is also used for Raymond Williams’s approach in cultural studies, which ties culture to class and power.
Rationale
A Part 2 footnote lists ‘infrastructure, social structure, superstructure’, close to Harris’s three levels, among the models behind its nested circles. We don’t take his one-way causation; Part 1 has arrangements and dispositions reproducing each other.