Notes from ‘Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture’ (Harris, 1979)

Harris, M. (1979). Cultural materialism: The struggle for a science of culture. California: AltaMira Press.

Preface

1. Cultural materialism drops the Hegelian motion of dialectic contradictions and adds reproductions and ecological variables to the material conditions under study (p. ix)
2. Marx was the first to formally propose that the material means of subsistence forms the foundation upon which society is formed (p. ix)
3. Marxism-Leninism, unlike Marx’s scientific materialism, overemphasized the dialectic over the objective and empirical (p. x)

Chapter 1

1. Francis Bacon emphasized the process of induction for gathering and organizing facts. However, facts are unreliable without a theory guiding its organization and discrimination of relevant and irrelevant information. At the same time, theory without facts is meaningless (p. 7)
2. True science balances induction, empiricism and positivism, on one hand with deduction and rationalism on the other (p. 8)
3. “Observation must be for or against a view if it is to be of any service” – Charles Darwin (p. 12)
4. Operationalism is required in the social sciences due to the field’s tendency to define its concepts and constructs fuzzily (p. 15)
5. Karl Popper posited that good science falsifies hypothesis rather than just verifying hypothesis. In other words, good science hypotheses expose themselves to the possibility of being proven wrong (p. 16-17)
6. Imre Lakatos posits that research programs should be evaluated based on their effectiveness at solving the field’s puzzles (p. 23)

Chapter 2

1. Marx and Engels laid the foundation for demystifying social life by focusing on the material conditions that made them happen in the first place (p. 30)
2. Emic operations evaluate the perspective of the native informant/participant of a social participant of a social practice, while etic operations evaluate the perspectives of an external observer who is not part of a culture engaged in some social behavior (p. 32)
3. Harris provided an example of emic and etic explanations of the phenomenon of high mortality rates of male cattle in a community in southern India. When locals were asked why male cattle died more, they said the male cattle ate less than the female ones. This is an emic explanation. However, the etic explanation was that since the community didn’t need male cattle for transportation or to work farms, they knowingly /unknowingly culled them (p. 33)
4. Sometimes, it could be challenging to provide etic descriptions of mental life as the external observer does not know what is going on inside the minds of the natives when they are engaged in a particular social behavior (p. 40)
5. Harris acknowledges that scientists and other “observers” bring their own biases into providing etic descriptions, but to claim “all knowledge is emic” is to claim that there is no real way to know/study the world and that everything is relative (p. 45)

Chapter 3

1. Cultural materialism starts with an etic human population located in an etic time and space (p. 47)
2. Cultural materialism posits that every society must solve the problem of production (i.e. subsistence), the problem of reproduction and the coordination of relationships within and between societal groups (p. 51)
3. Harris’s taxonomy is as follows: (a) Mode of production which deals with producing food and energy, given the constraints of technology and the environment; (b) Mode of reproduction which deals with moderating the population size; (c) Domestic economy which deals with coordination of production and reproduction within a societal group; (d) Political economy which deals with the coordination of production and reproduction between societal groups; (e) Behavioral superstructure which deals with symbols, values, religion, etc. (p. 52-54)
4. Harris taxonomy can be further simplified into: (a) Infrastructure: (Modes of production and modes of reproduction); (b) Structure: (Domestic and political economy); (c) Superstructure (p. 52)
5. Language plays a vital role in coordinating activities at all levels of Harris taxonomy (p. 54)
6. “The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness” – Karl Marx (p. 55)
7. Harris espouses infrastructural determinism where modes of production and reproduction probabilistically determine domestic and political economies, which, in turn, probabilistically determines superstructure (p. 55)
8. Cultural materialism theories see infrastructure as the root cause of everything else (p. 55)
9. Harris prioritizes infrastructure because of the fact that humans have to balance energy consumption with production and reproduction. This is an iron clad law of nature that provides solid ground for any form of theory building (p. 56)
10. Patterns of reproduction and production are grounded in nature and can only be changed by the expenditure of energy (p. 58)
11. Harris is not downplaying innovation rather he argues that they cannot take hold unless the material condition for their adoption is also present (p. 59)
12. “We want what we will but we do not will what we do not want” – Arthur Schopenhauer (p. 60)
13. Although groups survive at the expense of the individuals, the direction of cultural change cannot be predicted by summing up the greatest good for the greatest number (p. 61)
14. Harris lists out 4 human behavioral constants: (a) People prefer more calories than less; (b) People prefer expending less energy than more; (c) People find sex pleasurable; (d) People prefer more love and affection to less (p. 63)
15. Harris’s critique of Marx was that the later focused on emic properties of the structure, e.g., capital, profits, etc., instead of prioritizing etic explanations (p. 55)
16. Cultural evolution has three main characteristics: (a) Increasing energy budgets; (b) Increasing productivity; (c) Increasing population growth (p. 67)
17. Unlike classical Marxism, cultural materialism sees the production of children as part of infrastructure (p. 66)
18. Harris argues that increases in efficiency brought about by innovations in technology hasn’t let to saving labor, but to increasing energy budgets which has been used to increase the population (p. 67)
19. Harris argues that changes in infrastructural levels are more likely to spread throughout other levels than vice versa (p. 71-72)
20. Harris clarifies that he’s not saying changes at the structural or superstructural levels cannot change things at other levels (p. 72)
21. Harris argues innovations at the level of structure or superstructure are unlikely to change the system if it is not compatible with the existing infrastructure (p. 73)

Chapter 4

1. Nomothetic = General causes and effects; Idiographic = Particular individual instances (p. 78)
2. Harris argues that hunter-gatherers were mobile because they had no control where the fauna and flora were likely to grow. This infrastructure, in turn, led to those groups having a coordination and organization (i.e., structure) that was small, mobile and camplike (p. 80)
3. Harris also argues that more complex family structures are not found among the hunter-gatherers because of the infrastructure (i.e., limited resources and seasonal variations in fauna and flora) (p. 80)
4. Harris argues that hunter-gatherer societies who were in an environment where resources were plentiful were more likely to use lactation rather than abortion or infanticide as a means for population control (p. 83)
5. Harris agues the shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture was likely facilitated by global changes in the climate (p. 86)
6. Harris also argues that the transition from hunter-gathering to agricultural societies was also due to the incentive of producing more children who could assist with farming operations to increase yield while not necessarily depleting energy demands (p. 88)
7. Harris argued that pre-state societies differed in their structural and superstructural components based on the soil nutrient needs (infrastructure) in their local contexts (p. 89)
8. In Harris model, “big men” facilitate complexity at the level of social coordination. They do this by: (a) Intensifying production; (b) Redistributing harvest surpluses; (c) Coordinating to get more resources (through trade or war) (p. 92)
9. In Harris model, “big men” can also perpetrate inequality usually caused by a shift from egalitarian redistribution to asymmetrical redistribution (p. 92)
10. Infrastructure involving flora like grains and fauna like ruminant animals were also likely to have structures where asymmetric distribution was done by “big men”.  Incidentally, regions where this happened were also the societies that first shifted into statehood (p. 94)
11. Harris argued that the following circumstances led to the shift from chiefdoms to state: (a) A large energy base to cater for the needs of a permanent police/military subgroup; (b) A peasant base unable to easily leave the group in search for less densely populated regions (p. 101)
12. Elites spent considerable costs in constructing artifacts that supported superstructures (e.g., temples, altars, etc.) That convinced peasants that the elite were benevolent. Obedience from mystification was cheaper than obedience via police force (p. 102)
13. Harris argued that feudal kings of Europe were overall weaker than emperors in hydraulic societies (i.e., societies living near a river source) because the feudal kings had no control on who rain fell on, while the hydraulic emperors could set up controls to prevent waters from the rivers from flowing to the hinterlands. In other words, geography isn’t destiny, but it constrains the kind of social coordinated structures that evolve in an area (p. 105)
14. Harris argued that the political structures that evolved based on decentralized non-hydraulic societies allowed the rise of a merchant class that led to modern day capitalism (p. 105)
15. Dowries were common in pre-industrial Europe and Asia, while bride price was common in pre-industrial Africa. Harris argues that a dowry society is a symptom of reproductive pressure, i.e., it is to discourage (unconsciously) overpopulation while bride price is a symptom of a society that was sparsely populated and had a lot of land that could be cultivated (p. 107)
16. Harris also argues that religions prosper because the ruling elite who adopted them benefitted materially from it – either through making the poor care less about material benefits, (“heaven is the goal”) or through making it cheaper to maintain law and order (“all life is sacred”) (p. 110)
17. Harris argues that the taboo surrounding eating human flesh developed from the availability of domestic animals for food; and the value of prisoners of war as a source of manpower (p. 110)
18. Harris argues that capitalism in Europe developed in response to the depletion of feudal modes of production (p. 111)

Chapter 5

1. Behavior is not exclusively genetically determined (p. 120)
2. Cultural repertories evolve independently of natural selection. For instance, Edison’s inventions would have spread even if had remained childless (p. 122)
3. Under normal biological circumstances, all behavioral innovations that persist in offspring do so because they contribute to fitness and reproductive success (p. 122)
4. In humans, natural selection increased human cognitive capabilities and simultaneously downplayed the dependence on genetic transmission to preserve behavioral innovations (p .123)
5. The bulk of human behavioral repertoire can be acquired through cultural rather than genetic, transmission (p. 125)
6. Harris argues that the idea that males desire multiple sexual partners while females only desire one is a product of domination of males in the political economy. In societies where women have independent wealth and power, they also tend to have multiple sexual partners (p. 129)
7. The idea that young humans have a long socialization period has less to do with genes and more to do with the breath of social traditions to learn (p. 129)
8. At the emic level, some cultures deem males more valuable than females, but at the etic level, it’s really just population control (p. 133)
9. Semantic universality: The ability to communicate about infinite classes of events regardless of when or where they occur (p. 134)
10. Natural selection has favored a behavioral genotype where programming acquired through personal/social learning has dominated programming acquired via genetic change (p. 134)
11. Harris posits that ecological conditions at the infrastructural level increase or decrease biophysiological costs and benefits of certain innovative behaviors – not that certain behaviors are genetically preprogrammed to occur in certain conditions that increase fitness (p. 137)
12. Among the elite in medieval Europe, India and China, preferential female infanticide was practiced to consolidate wealth and avoid paying dowries. On the other hand, among the peasant class, there were less occurrences of female infanticide because the females could provide manpower for labor (p. 138)

Chapter 6

1. Cultural materialism and dialectical materialism disagree on what makes up infrastructure (p. 141)
2. “… hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first eat and drink before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc., and therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or driving a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained instead of vice versa as has hitherto been the case” – Frederick Engels (p. 141-142)
3. Hegel was an idealist who believed that things were the express manifestations of ideas. He also believed that things that exist today are all destined to change into its opposite. In addition, Hegel posited that the contradictions between an idea and its opposite doesn’t lead to a back-and-forth between the duo, but to a progression towards some complete ideal (p. 142-143)
4. For Marx, it is the modes of production (not ideas) that are destined to change into its opposite as everything progresses towards a classless utopia (p. 143)
5. Marx posited that contradiction of capitalism is that capitalists have to exploit labor to make profit. To stay competitive, at some point, they invest the profits into machines which takes the place of laborers. This investment of profits reduces the amount of profits available for the capitalists. So, to maximize profits, the capitalists have to double down and exploit labor further.  If this continues, wealth becomes concentrated with the capitalist while the laborers become more and more resentful with the falling standards of living. The more the capitalist exploits labor, the more likely laborers ought to organize themselves to destroy the capitalist system. In Marx’s system, capitalism creates the opposite that destroys it (p. 143-144)
6. Harris argues that the weakness of a dialectical epistemology is that every event contains an indefinite number of components which all have an indefinite amount opposites/negations. This means that the most critical opposites cannot be identified and a dialectical relationship cannot be falsified (p. 145)
7. Evolution is the process of change. Harris argues that labelling any change as ‘dialectical’ doesn’t provide any additional information (p. 146)
8. Lenin attacked empiricism because he wanted to overstate the revolutionary component of Marxist thought (p. 150)
9. Capitalism is full of stresses, but Harris argues that its problems won’t be solved by classless and stateless societies (p. 150)
10. Harris concedes that contradiction, negation and opposites are useful descriptors when discussing changes that play out in the struggle between classes or between nations. But he doesn’t agree that the descriptors are useful in any system where there is change (p. 151)
11. Dialectical materialism, according to Harris, is committed to the expectation that a classless society will emerge from capitalism – regardless of how much evidence demonstrates that to not be the case (p. 157)
12. Marx and Engels were not able to fit the data from non-European and precapitalist history into their model (p. 162)

Chapter 7

1. “Structure” in structuralism means the mental superstructure in cultural materialism’s taxonomy (p. 165)
2. Emile Durkheim proposed the idea that society has a “collective consciousness,” i.e., the ideas that are external to an individual but can influence the behavior and thoughts of individuals in that society (p. 166)
3. Structuralists believe that the mind has molds (which they call structures) and culture fills these molds with the ideas pertaining to that culture. Structuralism is the attempt to explain the “collective consciousness” as a mental dialectic (p. 167)
4. Structuralism, according to Harris, is not concerned with the empirical proof, but with understanding the collective consciousness (p. 169)
5. “History shows that to treat as heroes people who abominate empirical reality is to risk destruction” – Marvin Harris (p. 170)
6. In structuralism, there are hidden meanings underneath different thoughts. The hidden meanings are always reduced to two opposing ideas. These opposite ideas, according to according to structuralism, always exist in the collective unconscious. So, in this model, the structure underneath the institution of marriage is exchanged between the opposite ideas of “us” and “them” or “mine” and “yours” (p. 167, 171)                   
7. Structural anthropologists posit that people select food based on the message underlying the food (e.g., “roasted” food vs “boiled” food represents the message of “nature” vs “nurture”). Cultural materialists, on the other hand, posit that food preparation practices are probabilistically determined by the kind of infrastructure in place (e.g., Asian cultures developed rapid frying in response to fuel shortages in densely populated areas) (p. 188, 190)

Chapter 8

1. Unlike cultural materialists, structural Marxists do not see the need to separate the “relations of production” (Harris’s structure) from the “forces of production” (Harris’s infrastructure) (p. 220)
2. The Hegelian-Marxist-Leninist model couldn’t predict how the socialist revolutions took place in industrially backward nations (i.e., early 20^th century China & Russia) rather than in the more industrially developed nations at the time (e.g., US, Germany, or Japan) (p. 221)
3. Marx’s model has some ambiguity because it doesn’t distinguish between the mental-emic and the behavioral-etic components of social systems. Although Marx acknowledged the role of the religious superstructure, the other factors in his base which he attributed causality to also had “imaginary” properties. For instance, capital is a mystified form of labor; commodities hide the labor processes it took to create them. These elements of Marx’s model look more Hegelian idealism rather than materialist (p. 225)
4. In the cultural materialist’s formulation, the physical control of the masses labor through physical control of the state’s police-military apparatus (another form of labor) is what allows the emic-mental structure of capitalism (i.e., contracts, rent, money, interests, and profits) to exist in the first place (p. 226-227)
5. The mystification/fetishization of social stratification in a socio-cultural system is a consequence of controlling the physical instruments of coercion (i.e., the people who work as police and armies) (p. 228)
6. Harris contends that the type of social and economic systems that developed in the Andes versus in Brazil was not only due to the Catholic ideologies of the early Europeans who colonized them, but more due to the ecological factors (highlands in the Andes versus tropics in Brazil) and demographics (different population characteristics in the Andes and in Brazil which led to the importation of African slaves in the latter vs dependence on the local population in former) (p. 230)
7. In Aboriginal Australia, marriage rules (i.e., political economy in Harris model) is dependent on the environmental factors. The drier the land the more disperse the bands and the more necessary it is to establish multi-band networks through inter-band marriage (p. 231)
8. Another school of thought adjacent to structural Marxism is ‘substantivism’ which argues that economic concepts identified from observing capitalist societies cannot be applied to pre-state/primitive societies because of the differences in the social relationship in both societies. Substantivists argues that extending capitalist derived concepts to pre-state societies makes the analyst to force-fit every society into the image of the capitalist (p. 234)
9. An extension of substantivist thought is the idea that economic process and concepts do not exists outside the social system that instituted it. The corollary of this is the idea that economic ideas such as surplus cannot be empirically/objectively determined because it only exists in the collective consciousness of the people in a society (p. 235-236)
10. Some substantivists extend their ideas to say that concepts such as classes, and exploitation of one class by another has no existence outside the collective consciousness of the people of the society (p. 237)
11. “Primitive” societies such as those in pre-colonial Africa are “underproductive” not because they tended to adjust their labor intensity to just produce whatever will serve their subsistence needs. Instead, cultural materialism argues that continual intensification of any given society’s mode of production would eventually lead to diminishing returns. In a “primitive” society that depends on labor intensity, rather than technology to increase productivity, continual accumulation of labor (either through forcing locals or getting slaves from neighboring societies) does not dramatically increase productivity, but will likely increase the chances of political instability in retaliatory, attacks from neighboring enemies. As a consequence, “underproduction” shouldn’t be looked at only from the perspective of the environment’s carrying capacity but from the perspective of intensification of the available modes of production before diminishing returns kick in (p.240)
12. Harris argues that cows were present in India in the pre-Vedic times (4000-2000 BC) as evidenced by the presence of charred cattle bones found in houses from the era. From the Vedic era (2000 – 800BC), killing and eating cattle became ritualized. Within this era sects arose within the area that prioritized the ritual/sacrificial use of cattle (like Levites in the Bible) over its other uses. These were the Brahmins. Buddhism and Jainism soon arose in the area that challenged Brahmin practices through its condemnation of animal sacrifices. Harris attributes this conversion from religious groups that routinely sacrificed cattle to those that didn’t to the intensification of production and increased population which led to deforestation and its attendant changes in environmental conditions. In these conditions, Harris argues that cattle became more valuable for its ability to pull plows than for its meat – hence the rise of taboos arising in religions in the region to prevent cattle from being eaten (p. 249-253)
13. Pork was preferred to beef was in the U.S. up until the 19^th century when beef started to take ascendancy due to technological developments like the refrigerated railroad can that delivered beef across the nature (p. 255)
14. Harris argues that dogs and humans are only eaten in cultures where alternative sources of meat are scarce. Otherwise, societies preferred cattle, sheep, and poultry that gain weight (more meat) from merely eating grains (p. 255)

Chapter 9

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Chapter 10

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Chapter 11

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