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Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Materialism of Marvin Harris

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04-23-2019 , 02:52 PM

well named

poorly undertitled

Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 78,077

Marvin Harris was an American anthropologist most known for his advocacy of a certain approach to explaining various aspects of culture, called cultural materialism.

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches (1974) is a very accessible and somewhat breezy collection of essays about specific cultural phenomena, which Harris tries to explain in his own inimitable style. I like to think of the book as an interesting juxtaposition with the collection of essays I posted in the postmodernism thread, edited by James Clifford.

Clifford focuses emphasis on the partiality of ethnographic accounts and the "sociology of anthropology", if you will. Harris is entirely uninterested in all of that, and his approach was sometimes referred to as "vulgar marxism", because of his focus on explanations rooted in material and economic relations. I wanted to make a thread on Harris as much because he's fun to read as anything else. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches is more conversational and dispenses with in-text citations, favoring a bibliography at the end. It's been nearly 50 years, and I'm sure some of Harris' arguments don't hold up, but I think he raises interesting issues anyway, and I hope these selections will be both entertaining and thought-provoking.

By way of background, here's how Harris describes his approach, in the introduction to the book:

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I respect the work of individual scholars who patiently expand and perfect their knowledge of a single century, tribe, or personality, but I think that such efforts must be made more responsive to issues of general and comparative scope. The manifest inability of our overspecialized scientific establishment to say anything coherent about the causes of lifestyles does not arise from any intrinsic lawlessness of life-style phenomena. Rather, I think it is the result of bestowing premium rewards on specialists who never threaten a fact with a theory...

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This book is about the causes of apparently irrational and inexplicable lifestyles. Some of these enigmatic customs occur among preliterate or "primitive" peoples--for example, the boastful American Indian chiefs who burn their possessions to show how rich they are....

Ours is an age that claims to be the victim of an overdose of intellect. In a vengeful spirit, scholars are busily at work trying to show that science and reason cannot explain variations in human lifestyles. And so it is fashionable to insist that the riddles examined in the chapters to come have no solution....

To explain different patterns of culture we have to begin by assuming that human life is not merely random or capricious. Without this assumption, the temptation to give up when confronted with a stubbornly inscrutable custom or institution soon proves irresistible. Over the years I have discovered that lifestyles which others claimed were totally inscrutable actually had definite and readily intelligible causes. The main reason why these causes have been so long overlooked is that everyone is convinced that "only God knows the answer."

Another reason why many customs and institutions seem so mysterious is that we have been taught to value elaborate "spiritualized" explanations of cultural phenomena more than down-to-earth material ones. I content that the solution to each of the riddles examined in this book lies in a better understanding of practical circumstances. I shall show that even the most bizarre-seeming beliefs and practices turn out on closer inspection to be based on ordinary, banal, one might say "vulgar" conditions, needs and activities. What I mean by a banal or vulgar solution is that it rests on the ground and that it is built up out of guts, sex, energy, wind, rain, and other palpable and ordinary phenomena

Next, some excerpts...

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04-23-2019 , 03:06 PM

well named

poorly undertitled

Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 78,077

The Sacred Cow

Harris begins the book with a chapter discussing Hindu beliefs about the sacredness of cows and the laws and customs related to those beliefs, particularly laws that forbid the killing of cows. Bear in mind this text is nearly 50 years old...

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Whenever I get into discussions about the influence of practical and mundane factors on lifestyles, someone is sure to say, "But what about all those cows the hungry peasants of India refuse to eat?" The picture of a ragged farmer starving to death alongside a big fat cow conveys a reassuring sense of mystery to Western observers. In countless learned and popular allusions, it confirms our deepest conviction about how people with inscrutable Oriental minds ought to act. It is comforting to know--somewhat like "there will always be an England"--that in India spiritual values are more precious than life itself....

Westerners find the idea that there might be a practical explanation for Hindu love of cow more upsetting than Hindus do. The sacred cow--how else can I say it?--is one of our favorite sacred cows.

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According to many experts, cow worship is the number one cause of India's hunger and poverty. Some Western-trained agronomists say that the taboo against cow slaughter is keeping one hundred million "useless" animals alive. They claim that cow worship lowers the efficiency of agriculture because the useless animals contribute neither milk nor meat while competing for croplands and foodstuff with useful animals and hungry human beings. A study sponsored by the Ford Foundation in 1959 concluded that possibly half of India's cattle could be regarded as surplus in relation to feed supply. An economist from the University of Pennsylvania stated in 1971 that India has thirty million unproductive cows.

It does seem that there are enormous numbers of surplus, useless, and uneconomic animals, and that this situation is a direct result of irrational Hindu doctrines. Tourists on their way through Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, and other Indian cities are astonished at the liberties enjoyed by the stray cattle. Love of cow affects life in many ways. Government agencies maintain old age homes for cows at which owners may board their dry and decrepit animals free of charge. In Madras, the police round up stray cattle that have fallen ill and nurse them back to health by letting them grace on small fields adjacent to the station house. Farmers regard their cows as members of the family, adorn them with garlands and tassels, pray for them when they get sick, and call in their neighbors and a priest to celebrate the birth of a new calf....

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To Western observers familiar with modern industrial techniques of agriculture and stock raising, cow love seems senseless, even suicidal... And yet one finds certain inconsistencies in the condemnation of cow love....

Agriculture is part of a vast system of human and natural relationships. To judge isolated portions of this "ecosystem" in terms that are relevant to the conduct of American agribusiness leads to some very strange impressions. Cattle figure in the Indian ecosystem in ways that are easily overlooked or demeaned by observers from industrialized, high-energy societies. In the United States, chemicals have almost completely replaced animal manure as the principal source of farm fertilizer. American farmers stopped using manure when they began to plow with tractors rather than mules or horses. Since tractors excrete poisons rather than fertilizers, a commitment to large-scale machine farming is almost of necessity a commitment to large-scale machine farming is almost of necessity a commitment to the use of chemical fertilizers. And around the world today there has in fact grown up a vast integrated petrochemical-tractor-truck industrial complex that produces farm machinery, motorized transport, oil and gasoline, and chemical fertilizers.

For better or worse, most of India's farmers cannot participate in this complex, not because they worship their cows, but because they can't afford to buy tractors. To convert from animals and manure to to tractors and petrochemicals would require the investment of incredible amounts of capital. Moreover, the inevitable effect of substituting costly machines for cheap animals is to reduce the number of people who can earn their living from agriculture and to force a corresponding increase in the size of the average farm....

With this alternative in view, it becomes easier to understand low-energy, small-scale, animal-based systems. As I have already pointed out, cows and oxen provide low-energy substitutes for tractors and tractor factories. They also should be credited with carrying out the functions of a petrochemical industry. India's cattle annually excrete about 700 million tons of recoverable manure. Approximately half of of this total is used as fertilizer, while most of the remainder is burned to provide heat for cooking. The annual quantity of heat liberated by this dung, the Indian housewife's main cooking fuel, is the thermal equivalent of 27 million tons of kerosene, 35 million tons of coal, or 68 million tons of wood. Since India has only small reserves of oil and coal and is already the victim of extensive deforestation, none of these fuels can be considered practical substitutes for cow dung.

I think this section summarizes what I like about Harris' approach to studying culture:

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Do I mean to say that cow love has no effect whatsoever on the cattle sex ratio [cows to oxen -- related to the use of oxen for traction; there are 30% fewer cows than oxen] or on other aspects of the agricultural system? No. What I am saying is that cow love is an active element in a complex, finely articulated material and cultural order. Cow love mobilizes the latent capacity of human beings to persevere in a low-energy ecosystem in which there is little room for waste or indolence. Cow love contributes to the adaptive resilience of the human population by preserving temporarily dry or barren but still useful animals; by discouraging the growth of an energy-expensive beef industry; by protecting cattle that fatten in the public domain or at landlord's expense [helping the poor]; and by preserving the recovery potential of the cattle population during droughts and famines....

Thinking back to the sociology of knowledge, I think the point to be emphasized is in the way that beliefs contribute to collective social action of a very practical nature, helping to organize society so that people can contribute to the described order without necessarily having to understand it scientifically. "Cows are sacred" is a lot easier to convey than the details of a "low-energy complex ecosystem." Harris' largest point (borrowing from Marx here) is that the content of specific beliefs and values often serves to obfuscate the more mundane underlying reasons for social behavior, even while those same beliefs contribute to the social cohesion that is required for that behavior to persist. This mediating relationship between beliefs, the social order and its legitimization, and the basic material realities of life is an important one.

Last edited by well named; 04-23-2019 at 03:11 PM.

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04-24-2019 , 08:34 PM

Kelhus999

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Join Date: Apr 2019 Posts: 3,282

I am curious. What makes this viewpoint different than one an evolutionary biologist might hold? They seem pretty compatible to me.

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04-24-2019 , 08:53 PM

well named

poorly undertitled

Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 78,077

I'm not sure that that there is anything which precludes an evolutionary biologist from employing a similar approach. I'd guess the evolutionary biologist might be inclined to look further back in time for evolutionary processes, but Harris does that on occasion himself also, e.g. in a chapter which ponders the origins of warfare. (I'm also reminded of Geertz' chapter on the role of cultural development in the evolution of human minds.)

I also don't think there's anything which precludes social scientists in general from being interested in evolutionary biology, nor anything which should preclude evolutionary biologists for thinking about social theory. Or both from thinking about psychology, economics, political science, neurology, or etc. I think it's all useful. The separation of disciplines in academia is mostly an arbitrary consequence of the intellectual history of the fields, in my view.

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04-28-2019 , 07:08 PM

well named

poorly undertitled

Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 78,077

Status Seeking: The Potlatch

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Some of the most puzzling lifestyles on exhibit in the museum of world ethnography bear the imprint of a strange craving known as the "drive for prestige." Some people seem to hunger for approval as others hunger for meat. The puzzling thing is not that people hunger for approval, but that occasionally their craving seems to become so powerful that they begin to compete with each for for prestige as others compete for land or protein or sex. Sometimes this competition grows so fierce that it appears to become an end in itself. It then takes on the appearance of an obsession wholly divorced from, and even directly opposed to, rational calculations of material costs.

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The most bizarre instance of status seeking was discovered among the American Indians who formerly inhabited the coastal regions of Southern Alaska, British Colombia, and Washington. Here the status seekers practiced what seems like a maniacal form of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste knows as potlatch.

The Object of potlatch was to give away or destroy more wealth than one's rival. If the potlatch giver was a powerful chief, he might attempt to shame his rivals and gain everlasting admiration from his followers by destroying food, clothing, and money. Sometimes he might even seek prestige by burning down his own house.

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Potlatch was made famous by Ruth Benedict in her book Patterns of Culture, which describes how potlatch operated among the Kwakiutl, the aboriginal inhabitants of Vancouver Island. Benedict thought that potlatch was part of a megalomaniacal lifestyle characteristic of Kwakiutl culture in general. Ever since, potlatch has been a monument to the belief that cultures are the creations of inscrutable forces and deranged personalities....

I want to show here that the Kwakiutl potlatch was not the result of maniacal whims, but of definite economic and ecological conditions. When these conditions are absent, the need to be admired and the drive for prestige express themselves in in completely different lifestyle practices. Inconspicuous consumption replaces conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste is forbidden, and there are no competitive status seekers.

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All of the basic ingredients of the Kwakiutl giveaways, except for their destructive aspects, are present in societies widely dispersed over different parts of the globe. Stripped down to its elementary core, the potlatch is a competitive feast, a nearly universal mechanism for assuring the production and distribution of wealth among peoples who have not yet fully acquired a ruling class.

Melanesia and New Guinea present the best opportunities to study competitive feasting under relatively pristine conditions. Throughout this region, there are so-called "big men" who owe their superior status to the large number of feasts that each has sponsored during his lifetime. Each feast has to be preceded by an intensive effort on the part of the aspiring big man to accumulate the necessary wealth.

Among the Kaoka-speaking people of the Solomon islands, for example, the status-hungry individual begins his career by making his wife and children plant larger yam gardens. As described by the Australian anthropologist Ian Hogbin, the Kaoka who wants to become a big man then gets his kinsmen and his age-mates to help him fish. Later he begs sows from his friends and increases the size of his pig herd. As the litters are born he boards additional animals from his neighbors. Soon his relatives and friends feel that the young man is going to be a success. They see his large gardens and his big pig herd and they redouble their own efforts to make the forthcoming feast a memorable one. When he becomes a big man they want the young candidate to remember that they helped him.

Finally, they all get together and build an extra-fine house. The men go off on one last fishing expedition. The women harvest yams and collect firewood, banana leaves, and coconuts. As the guests arrive (as in the case of potlatch), the wealth is tacked in neat piles and put on display for everyone to count and admire.

One difference, the culture of these feasts is one in which the would-be "big-man" gives away the wealth, rather than destroying it and rather than keeping most of it for himself. "The giver of the feast takes the bones and thestale cakes; the meat and the fat go to the others" is a saying in Guadalcanal.

Here, according to Harris, is the functional explanation of this behavior:

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The feast-giving days of the big man, like those of the potlatch chiefs, are never over. On threat of being reduced to commoner status, each big man is obliged to busy himself with plans and preparations for the next feast. Since there are several big men per village and community, these plans and preparations often lead to complex competitive maneuvering for the allegiance of relatives and neighbors....

Under conditions where everyone has equal access to the means of subsistence, competitive feasting serves the practical function of preventing the labor force from falling back to levels of productivity that offer no margin of safety in crises such as war and crop failures. Furthermore, since there are no formal political institutions capable of integrating independent villages into a common economic framework, competitive feasting creates an extensive network of economic expectations. This has the effect of pooling the productive effort of larger populations than can be mobilized by any given village. Finally, competitive feasting by big men acts as an automatic equalizer of annual fluctuations in productivity among a series of villages that occupy different microenvironments -- seacoast, lagoon, or upland habitats.

So, why did this develop into the potlatch observed by Ruth Benedict?

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All of these points apply to the Kwakiutl. The Kwakiutl chiefs were like Melanesian big men except that they operated with a much more productive technological inventory in a richer environment.... Despite the overt competitive thrust of potlatch, it functioned aboriginally to transfer food and other valuables from centers of high productivity to less fortunate villages. I should put this even more strongly: because of the competitive thrust, such transfers were assured....

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Why did the practical basis of potlatch escape the attention of Ruth Benedict? Anthropologists began to study potlatch only long after the aboriginal peoples of the Pacific Northwest had entered into commercial and wage-labor relations with Russian, English, Canadian, and American merchants and settlers. This contact rapidly gave rise to epidemics of smallpox and other European diseases that killed off a large part of the native population. For example, the population of the Kwakiutl fell from 23,000 in 1836 to 2,000 in 1886. The decline automatically intensified the competition for manpower.

At the same time, wages page by the Europeans pumped unprecedented amounts of wealth into the potlatch network. From The Hudson's Bay Company, the Kwakiutl received thousands of trade blankets in exchange for animal skins. At the great potlatches these blankets replaced food as the most important item to be given away. The dwindling population soon found itself with more blankets and other valuables than it could consume. Yet the need to attract followers was greater than ever due to the labor shortage. So the potlatch chiefs ordered the destruction of property in the vain hope that such spectacular demonstrations of wealth would bring the people back to the empty villages. But these were the practices of a dying culture struggling to adapt to a new set of political and economic conditions; they bore little resemblance to the potlatch of aboriginal times.

The rest of the chapter discusses competitive feasting and other cultural practices grounded in redistribution and the creation of broader economic ties to the development of more complex forms of social organization.

Harris contrasts hunter/gatherer cultures in which egalitarianism and an aversion to status-seeking is the norm to the "big-man" form of status seeking in which one had to give away the wealth one helped to create. He then connects this level of organization to the development of kingdoms and chiefdoms in which the "big men" become powerful enough that they no longer even have to do that, although their activities can still be linked to the kinds of economic production described above.

Again, the interesting idea is I think the relationship between mundane functional explanations for behavior like competitive feasting and the culturally grounded set of beliefs which both ensure that behavior while also obfuscating its functional value.

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