Cultural Materialism - a timeline

Cultural materialism: a timeline

1979

1871

1927

2001

1968

Marvin Harris dies

Marvin Harris, the founding father of Cultural Materialism, was born.

Marvin Harris published Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a science of culture. This was Marvin Harris's first full-length explication of cultural materialism as an anthropological theory.

Edward Tylor published Primitive Culture. In this book he introduced his theory of evolutionism, arguing that all cultures develop from “primitive” to “civilized” along the same scale.

Cultural materialism was introduced by Marvin Harris in his 1968 book The Rise of Anthropological Theory.

1859

Marvin Harris did fieldwork in Mozambique. From this fieldwork, Harris began to develop a positivist and materialist paradigm.

Cultural Materialism

a timeline by Noa Briceño (13787780), Francesca Cerra (13822896), Rachel Kok (14055082) and Ilona Toivanen (13655450)

Marvin Harris' Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Culture laid out in cultural materialist terms the evolutionary trajectories that lead to all features of human society (i.e., population growth, technological change, ecological change). This work also represents the point at which many believe Harris started placing too much emphasis on material conditions in explaining human society.

Marx postulated the essentials of the base-superstructure concept in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Marvin Harris later used these concepts to develop cultural materialism.

1957

Marvin Harris published Why nothing works: The anthropology of daily life, which examines the changes taking place in modern America, and discusses shoddy workmanship, poor service, inflation, crime, and religious cults.

The Russian Revolution took place. This historical event was the first successful socialist revolution and highlights the relevance of Marxist ideology during the beginning of the 20th century.

1977

1987

1917

Marvin Harris published Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. In this book, Marvin Harris explains various cultural traditions and behaviors by explaining its social and economic conditions. The book features among others the article The Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle, which is Harris’s best example of the application of cultural materialism, specifically to the Hindu taboo against eating beef. He demonstrates that this taboo makes sense in terms of the local environment because cattle are important in several ways.

Marvin Harris published Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times. This book brings together many of the strands of his work of the past two decades into a unified, contemporary statement on anthropological theory and practice.

First socialist state: The Soviet Union. The creation of the Soviet Union shows the political and ideoloical importance of Marxism and Socialism during the 20th century.

1977

1975

1922

1998

Raymond Williams published Marxism and Literature. Raymond Williams was a scholar who was concerned with both Marxist and cultural materialist perspectives on culture. In this book he provides criticism on Marxist theories of literature and language, and uses them to argue for a more cultural materialist approach.

2010s - present

Julian Steward developed the principle of cultural ecology, which holds that the environment shapes cultures. Cultural materialism was inspired by this theory.

Darwin published On the origin of species which provides essential ideas on biological evolution and adaptation that are central to the theoretical perspective of cultural evolutionism, and also provides inspiration for Marxism, cultural ecology and cultural materialism.

1955

Rise of the global climate crisis movement. The current ecological crisis on the one hand shows that there are upper limits to the size of the population that the environment can support, which relates to the concept of overpopulation that cultural ecology proposes. On the other hand, the crisis shows the capability of humans to destroy our environment, which can be seen as a critique to the cultural materialist idea that suggests that humans adapt to their environment.

Marvin Harris published Good to eat: riddles of food and culture, in which he further explains cultural phenomena from a cultural materialist perspective, specifically concerning food traditions

1859

1985