Cultural materialism

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The cultural materialism is one of Marvin Harris founded anthropological theory that culture attributes to their material conditions, ie geography, climate, environmental conditions (eg. As water and food resources). Cultures are systems that adapt to given environmental conditions and can be explained on the basis of ecology and geography (in contrast to structuralism ). The term cultural materialism was introduced by Harris in 1968 in his book The Rise of Anthropological Theory . The theory is based on approaches from Marxist materialism and evolutionary theory .

The principle of infrastructural determinism on which this theory is based states that the environmental conditions and natural resources determine the economic conditions and population growth or the reproductive possibilities of culture and society. Harris said in 1979 of his approach: "It is based on the simple premise that human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence." (It is based on the simple assumption that human social life is an answer to the practical problems of Existence on earth.)

Following Marxism, Harris distinguishes three levels of culture:

  • Infrastructure - production and reproduction ( biocenosis , technology , demography ) in interaction with the environment and elementary for the development and expression of structure and superstructure
  • Structure - kinship, politics, religion , war, economic organization
  • Superstructure - behavior and thinking, which in turn have an effect on infrastructure and structure

According to Harris, culture ( structure ) results from the pressure to adapt to the ecological framework. Using this pattern, he explains the rise and fall of cultures. He hopes to use this method to gain insight into the origin, maintenance and change of sociocultural differences and similarities. In addition, he set himself the goal of doing science not only as an accumulation of knowledge, but also to enable application-related knowledge. This should be done through access to structure and superstructure in order to improve societies and, last but not least, to achieve a more conscious and sustainable use of the infrastructure .

Cultural materialism emerged as the opposite direction to the theories of functionalism and structuralism , represented by Mary Douglas , Claude Lévi-Strauss and Émile Durkheim , among others .

Development of cultures from a cultural materialistic point of view

According to Harris and Jared Diamond , the development and thus also the failure of former societies can be traced back to an imbalance between natural resources, economic production and demographic development - an economic production that is not appropriate to natural resources (e.g. overgrazing or overexploitation) ), leads to the overuse and exhaustion of these very resources and as a result to the collapse of the economy (which deprived itself of its ecological basis). This leads to a negative demographic development (famine, emigration, etc.), which removes the culture-bearing society / culture itself from its existential basis.

However, a society can slow down / mitigate this development through norms and sanctions or through technological innovations. According to Harris , this explains the change from hunting to agriculture : the comparatively easy hunting of wild animals allows only low population densities or leads to overuse of game populations in large population groups (e.g. extinction of the mammoth ). Agriculture, on the other hand, enables greater population densities and overall populations, but requires a completely different organization of society than a community of hunters and gatherers, i.e. a cultural change. But agriculture and livestock husbandry also know growth limits - exceeding these limits ( erosion , salinization , total loss of agricultural land due to overuse) was, according to Harris, decisive for the demise of the ancient civilizations of the Orient and Mediterranean as well as the Maya empire.

Dennis L. Meadows argues similarly in his 1972 book The Limits to Growth .

literature

  • Marvin Harris: Cultural Anthropology. A textbook , Frankfurt 1989.
  • Marvin Harris: Cannibals and Kings. The growth limits of high cultures , Stuttgart 1990.
  • Jared Diamond: rich and poor. The fates of human societies. , Frankfurt am Main 2000.
  • Sven Papcke, Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff (ed.): Key works of sociology , Wiesbaden 2001, p. 205ff.

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