Cultural materialism (anthropology)
Cultural materialism is a well-founded by Marvin Harris cultural anthropological theory that culture leads back to their material conditions, ie on geography, climate, environmental conditions (eg water and food resources). Cultures are therefore systems that adapt to prevailing environmental conditions and are starting to explain ecology and geography (as opposed to structuralism ). The term Cultural materialism was introduced by Harris in his 1968 book, The Rise of Anthropological Theory. The theory is based on approaches of Marxist materialism and the theory of evolution.
That this theory underlying principle of infrastructural determinism states that the environmental conditions and natural resources determine the economic conditions and population growth or reproduction abilities of culture and society. Harris said in 1979 about his approach. " It is based on the simple premise did human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence" ( It is based on the simple assumption that human social life of a response to the practical problems can exist on the earth. )
Harris distinguishes three levels of culture on the basis of Marxism:
- Infrastructure - production and reproduction ( biocenosis, technology, demographics ) in interaction with the environment and essential for the development and characteristics of structure and superstructure
- Structure - kinship, politics, religion, war, economic organization
- Super structure - behavior and thinking, which in turn act back on infrastructure and structure
Culture ( structure ) results after Harris so from the pressure to adapt to the environmental conditions. Based on this pattern, he explains the rise and fall of cultures. He hopes by this method to gain knowledge regarding the origin, maintaining and changing socio-cultural differences and similarities. In addition, he made it his goal to not do science alone as a collection of knowledge, but also to enable application-oriented knowledge. This will be done by accessing structure and super structure to achieve an improvement of companies and, not least, a more conscious and sustainable use of the infrastructure.
The cultural materialism arose as a counter direction to the theories of functionalism and structuralism, represented inter alia by Mary Douglas, Claude Levi -Strauss and Émile Durkheim.
Development of cultures from a cultural materialist perspective
According to Harris and Jared Diamond to develop and thus the failure of former societies to an imbalance between natural resources, economic production and demographic development is - an economic production, which is not appropriate the natural resources (such as over-grazing and over-exploitation ), leads to the overuse and depletion of these resources and just in sequence to the collapse of the economy (which themselves and their ecological basis withdrew ). This leads to a negative demographic trends ( famine, migration, etc.), what the culture -bearing society / culture relieve itself of the existential basis.
A company may, however, slow down / soften by norms and sanctions or even through technological innovations this development. So after Harris is the change from Wildbeutertum to agriculture to explain: the comparatively comfortable Wildbeutertum permitted only low population densities or which have large populations to overuse of the wild stocks (eg: the extinction of the mammoth ). Agriculture, however, allows greater population densities and total populations, but requires an utter another organization of society as a community of hunters & collectors, so a cultural change. However, agriculture and animal husbandry know limits to growth - the exceeding of these limits (erosion, salinization, total loss of agricultural land due to overuse ) was after Harris decisive for the downfall of the ancient civilizations of the East and the Mediterranean and the Mayan Empire.
Similarly, Dennis L. Meadows argues in his classic 1972 book The Limits to Growth.