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:
Quote:
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...
Quote:
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...