CULTURAL MATERIALISM
'Cultural materialism' is a broad heading, but it usually refers to the the specific kind of materialist approach advocated by fMarvin Harris. He developed it in a number of works, the most significantly being Cannibals and Kings (1977) and Cultural Materialism (1979).
Harris maintains that the material world exhibits deterministic influence over the nonmaterial world. Thus *culture is a product of relations between things. In one of his more famous examples, Harris (1966) argues that the Hindu *taboo on killing cattle stems from Indian society's need to maximize the economic utility of cattle by favouring their use as draft animals rather than as meat. In this example, the implicit *functionalism of the cultural-materialist approach is apparent. Where Harris differs from conventional functionalists is in his emphasis on factors external to society, namely material ones.
Cultural materialism is allied to *ecological anthropology as well, precisely in that material factors are seen as determinant. In the culturalmaterialist view, environmental conditions and subsistence techniques together either determine or severely limit the development of many other aspects of culture. Above all, cultural materialism emphasizes etic over *emic categories. Harris and his followers regard observed behaviour as logically and chronologically prior to cultural categories. Thus *cognitive and *ideological aspects of culture must necessarily take second place to *technological ones.
Cultural materialism has been labelled 'vulgar materialism', on the grounds that it is too crude and simplistic to take adequate account of the embeddedness of the material world within the ideological world (Friedman 1974). In contrast, claims Friedman, dialectical materialism (i.e. Marxism) overcomes this vulgarity through a clear distinction between fbase and superstructure. Bluntly, to a 'vulgar materialist', there is only base; there is no superstructure. To complicate matters, the phrase 'cultural materialism' has had some currency in Marxist literary circles (e.g., in the work of fRaymond Williams), where it is used in a sense more akin to Friedman's Marxism than to Harris's purer materialist stance.
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