Cultural Materialism - The Struggle for a Science of Culture

Summary

A clear review, for big historians, of anthropologist Marvin Harris’s ‘cultural materialism’. For Harris, material conditions (technology, ecology, demography) shape family and political life, which shape art, ritual and belief. He “rejects the notion that ideas change the world”, writes reviewer Cynthia Stokes Brown, who finds him useful but “dated”, asking of matter and mind: “Which predominates? Which is causal?”

Rationale

Harris is a useful corrective to story-first narrative work: material conditions matter. We don’t follow him all the way, though; we’ve found ideas and conditions reshaping each other.