Material Culture:
It encompasses
all the physical objects produced by members of any particular culture. These
range from the purely utilitarian to the highly esoteric. Early anthropology
focused on the collection of such artifacts as a way to place societies in schemes
of evolutionary stages, but this approach fell out of favour with the rise of functionalism.
The study of material culture remains central to archaeology because such
artifacts provide the main body of data in that field. Design, arrangements of
material objects, accompanying symbolic meanings ranging from the minute study
of objects to cultural concept of space are all inspired by the anthropological
focus on material culture.
Materialism:
As a theoretical
paradigm material culture studies embraces materialism. Materialism includes a
variety of social theories that share certain critical assumptions: (1) that
the existence of a real physical world sets constraints for, and has a
significant impact on, human behavior; (2) that human behavior is part of
nature and can be understood by using the kinds of method that the natural
sciences employ in understanding nature. Materialists do not necessarily assume
that material reality is "more real" than mental or subjective
reality, but in the process of causal explanation they give priority to the
objective material world over subjective reality or the world of the mind. in
the social sciences the grandfather of all materialist doctrines is that of the
nineteenth-century social thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who
developed the "Materialist Interpretation of History," now generally
known as "historical materialism." Historical materialism divides all
societies into base and superstructure. The base involves those elements
essential to carrying out economic production, the "forces of
production," which for Marx and Engels generally meant technology, although
they also included the human physical environment. When these were combined
with the modes of ownership of the productive forces, known as the
"relations of production," they created a distinct MODE OF
PRODUCTION. Atop the mode of production sits the superstructure, consisting
primarily of politics and ideology but
in the broadest sense, including all of the remaining institutions of society. In
1845 6 Marx and Engels (1947) used their concept of mode of production to
periodize human history, identifying four main stages of historical
development, which they called primitive communism, SLAVERY (or the ancient
stage), feudalism, and CAPITALISM. They predicted that capitalism would
eventually be superseded by a socialist mode of production.
Cultural materialism:
The
materialist doctrine of Marx and Engels has lived on in the thinking of modern
Marxists and been modified by them. Numerous anthropologists have drawn on
Marxist materialism. These include the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe (1936)
and the cultural anthropologist Leslie White (1943), both of whom have had a
major impact on modern anthropology. Historical materialism has also had a
major impact in anthropology through its incorporation into Cultural
Materialism, a theoretical approach developed by Marvin Harris (1979) and his
followers.
Cultural
materialism identifies three major components to all human societies, what
Harris called the "universal pattern." All societies can be divided
into infrastructures, structures, and superstructures. The infrastructure
consists of those natural and cultural elements fundamental to human adaptation
and survival. It has two subcomponents, the mode of production and the mode of
reproduction. The mode of production includes technology, work patterns,
features of the geographic or physical environment, and technoenvironmental
relationships. It is basic to economic adaptation. The mode of reproduction
consists of those things relating to the propagation of the species and is
primarily demographic. It includes birth rates, death rates, size and density
of population, rates of population growth, and technology relating to birth and
population control. is best known for the way in which it links infrastructure,
structure, and superstructure. In Harris's terms, these three sociocultural
components are related through the Principle of Infrastructural Determinism.
This principle asserts that the infrastructure provides the basic foundation of
sociocultural life and is laid down first; it then exerts a strong determining
influence on the formation of the structure, which in turns exerts a strong
determining influence of its own on the formation of the superstructure. Harris
stressed that the causal relationships between these components are
probabilistic, and room is left for causal influence to operate in the reverse
direction; that is, from superstructure to structure to infrastructure. However,
it is assumed that causal influences flow in this reverse direction much less
often and much less significantly. Harris has also formulated an argument as to
why infrastructure should have the causal importance it does. In his view,
infrastructure has causal priority because it involves those things that relate
most fundamentally to human survival and physical well-being, aspects of life
that humans must grapple with before they become concerned with matters
relating to social organization and ideology.
A small class on material culture (bilingual, meant for my students)
Marvin Harris
(from Thomas Barfield's Dictionary of Anthropology 1997, Blackwell, copied to fulfill the requirement of students in COVID 19 lockdown emergency)
Marvin Harris is one of the most important anthropologists
of the second half of the twentieth century. His main contribution to
anthropology is the development of a distinctive theoretical approach, CULTURAL
MATERIALISM, which is a synthesis of marxist historical materialism, cultural
ecology, and social evolutionary theory. Harris was born in Brooklyn, NY in
1927 and educated at Columbia University, where he took his Ph.D. in 1953. He
then taught at Columbia until 1980, when he moved to the University of Florida
as Graduate Research Professor of Anthropology.
Harris has authored or edited nearly 20 books. His first
major work, Patterns of race in the Americas (1964), was based on his own
fieldwork in Brazil. It looked at the development of different patterns of RACE
and ETHNIC relations in the US South, highland Latin America (largely Mexico),
and the Latin American lowlands (largely Brazil). Harris tried to explain, for
example, the striking differences in the modes of racial categorization in the
US South and Brazil. He also inquired into the question as to why the Spanish
colonies in the Americas made such limited use of SLAVERY while Portuguese
America (Brazil) employed it on a large scale.
In 1968 Harris published his most erudite work to date, The
rise of anthropological theory, 750-page history of anthropological theory from
1750 to the present. In this work, Harris laid out quite systematically the
basic principles of cultural materialism and traced its origins. Other
anthropological theories are discussed and assessed in terms of their degree of
departure from a materialist perspective. The book garnered both praise and
criticism, the latter particularly intense from partisans for views that Harris
attacked.
Harris also wrote extensively for nonprofessional audiences.
He is best known for Culture, people, nature (1997), a general anthropology
textbook first published in 1971 that is now in its seventh edition and still
widely used. It provides an excellent introduction to cultural-materialist
thinking by extensively applying it to a wide range of social and cultural
phenomena. In 1974 Harris published Cows, pigs, wars, and witches: the riddles
of culture, based on a series of essays published regularly in Natural History
Magazine. The book attempted to explain so-called cultural riddles, such as the
Hindu sanctification of the cow and ban on eating it, or the Jewish and Muslim
abomination of the pig, by showing that they were sensible ADAPTATIONS to the
practical conditions of life that people had faced in different times and
places. It was quickly followed by Cannibals and kings: the origins of cultures
(1977), where Harris laid out a theoretical model of social EVOLUTION and
applied it to the last 10,000 years of human prehistory and history. This model
made population growth, ecological depletion, and technological change the
basic driving forces of history responsible for the evolution not only of
economic systems, but of all the major features of human society. In 1985
Harris published Good to eat: riddles of food and culture, one of his most
engaging works. This work was devoted to explaining FOOD TABOOS and DIET
patterns all over the world in terms of cultural materialist principles.
Harris developed the basic principles of cultural
materialism in the 1950s and 1960s, but it was in the 1970s and 1980s that he
wrote many of his most important works applying this perspective to particular
cultural phenomena. In 1979 Harris published Cultural materialism: the struggle
for a science of culture, which laid out the basic principles of cultural
materialism more extensively than Harris had done previously. The book also
criticized, quite severely in most cases, the other major competing paradigms
in anthropological theory. In a short book Harris (1981) later used cultural
materialism to explain the most important changes in US society since the end of
World War II; in another he attempted to explain population growth around the
world and throughout history (Harris & Ross 1987a).
Harris's production has slowed in recent years, and he may
have reached the end of his intellectual creativity. But even if he never
writes another word, his intellectual production has been prodigious and
enormously important. Modern anthropology is tremendously indebted to him, and
his intellectual influence has been great.
No comments:
Post a Comment