Cultural Materialism: What It Is And How This Research Approach Works
Anthropology, especially throughout the 20th century, has developed a whole series of perspectives from which to approach analysis.
One of the best known is that of cultural materialism In this article we will review this concept, we will discover how it emerged and what are the main characteristics that differentiate it from other ways of carrying out anthropological studies, understanding the pros and cons of this methodology.
Cultural materialism refers to a certain way of guiding anthropological research, characterized by focusing precisely on the material issues of a society and thus being able to determine, based on them, the degree of development that said human group would have. acquired.
Is about a concept created by author Marvin Harris, an American anthropologist who developed his career in the second half of the last century and whose ideas are still in vogue today Of all his contributions, cultural materialism is the one that had the most impact and for which he is usually known within this field of knowledge.
His approach to this system was seen for the first time in the book The Development of Anthropological Theory, which he published in 1968. Later he continued to delve deeper into this concept and developed it widely, through the volume Cultural Materialism, which was published in 1979.
In order to create this idea, Marvin Harris was influenced by other currents, especially the socialist authors Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and also by the work Eastern Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, by the author Karl August Wittfogel. He also collected ideas from other anthropologists, such as Lewis Henry Morgan, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor or Herbert Spencer.
The last influences that Marvin Harris took to develop the theory of cultural materialism were those of cultural evolution and cultural ecology by American anthropologists, Julian Haynes Steward and Leslie Alvin White, providing the evolutionary touch that their approach also draws on.
Components of cultural materialism
For Marvin Harris, through cultural materialism a distinction can be established by levels of three different forms of society systems, which would be the infrastructure, the structure and the superstructure.
Infrastructure would be the most basic of them. This level is related to the most basic needs of society and the way in which they are being satisfied This level would be acting as foundations for the others.
The infrastructure would have two major aspects, which would be production, in terms of the form of technology that said society uses and its ways of providing food and energy resources, and reproduction, referring to all issues related to the population level, whether with measures that seek to increase, decrease or maintain it.
2. Structure
Above the infrastructure, there would be the structure, the second level of cultural materialism. At this level, the anthropological analysis would already be contemplating other more complex features of the social group, such as the way of organizing itself at an economic or political level.
In this vision of the economic organization They range from domestic economies to the predominant economic systems at a global level The exchange of resources at all levels will therefore be studied. The same occurs with the political structure, which will go from the particular, analyzing the roles of individuals at the family level, to the social distribution of the entire group.
The relationships between different groups or societies, the forms of economic and political interaction, will also be taken into account. Likewise, the way in which work is distributed among the inhabitants and the hierarchies that are formed will be studied.
3. Superstructure
The third step in this series of levels that analyze the composition of a society, we reach that of the superstructure. This is the most complex level of all, and is supported by the previous two. In the superstructure, cultural materialism analyzes elements such as the ideology of the human group being studied, as well as the symbolic elements they use
It is at this level where artistic issues, games and sports, rituals, religions, taboo concepts and any other issue whose nature causes it to be included in the set of aspects of a society’s thinking are included.
It must be understood that this scheme has a pyramid structure, so the higher levels, although more complex, are subordinate to the lower ones. Each change in one level directly affects all those above it. In that sense, the level of infrastructure would be the most important of all, according to the theses of cultural materialism.
However, Although a change in the infrastructure entails a modification at the level of structure and superstructure, this alteration may not be immediate, but require time to become apparent. Likewise, it does not mean that for the second or third level to be modified, the first necessarily has to change, since changes can occur without the base having necessarily been altered.
In any case, if the changes come through this second route, it is true that the modifications, according to the model of cultural materialism, must be compatible with the existing base, that is, with the infrastructure, because if not, it will not be It is possible that a change of this typology may occur, since the base will not be able to support it as it is not in accordance with it.
Its epistemological basis
Epistemology is the way in which knowledge of a certain area is achieved. In this case, the epistemology of cultural materialism is carried out through the scientific method. Marvin Harris, creator of the model, maintains that this medium is the one that somehow guarantees the least number of mistakes and biases when obtaining knowledge, although it is not completely exempt from these problems.
Furthermore, the author warns of the problem of the fact that both the person carrying out the study and the object of study themselves are groups of human beings, since a person can behave differently when they are feeling evaluated and this is a variable. that must be taken into account when studying different cultures.
Following this question, Marvin Harris points out that it will be necessary to make a distinction between what people think and what they do, that is, between thoughts and behaviors. These two perspectives could be analyzed through the concepts emic and etic, which originally refer to phonology and phonetics, but in this context indicate whether the point of view is that of the native (emic) or that of the observer (etic). .
In this way, cultural materialism can contemplate both the perspective of the society itself that is being analyzed, and that of the anthropologist who is analyzing said social group, in order to obtain the dimensions of thoughts and behaviors and be able to unite both visions in a scheme. final, supported by two different bases, which will enrich the information we have.
Criticisms of this perspective
Although cultural materialism has been a very popular theory, it does not mean that it has not had its detractors. There are different criticisms of this model. For example, author Jonathan Friedman believes that this system is too reductionist and that it puts all the weight on the environmental context and forms of technology, making all other components of society develop according to them.
Criticism of Marvin Harris’ model has also come from postmodernism, in this case for the use of the scientific method, which for the defenders of this doctrine It would not be the only way to reach the truth and therefore there would be other ways of analyzing societies obtaining different perspectives.
For his part, James Lett criticizes cultural materialism for epistemological reasons, considering that it cannot be truly materialist, since causal relationships could not be established between the material and the immaterial. Instead, he indicates that we should talk about correlations.
Finally, the author Stephen K. Sanderson is also skeptical of the approaches of cultural materialism, since he considers that Marvin Harris uses this model to deal with complex concepts such as birth differences or incest, when These phenomena belong, according to him, to the field of social biology
These are some of the criticisms that this theory has faced, despite enjoying great popularity for other authors and sectors of anthropology.
