CULTURAL MATERIALISM AS A RESEARCH STRATEGY*

CULTURE Culture is the socially conditioned repertories of activities and thoughts that are associated with particular social groupings or populations (63).

AIM The aim of scientific research is to formulate explanatory theories which are: (1) predictive (or retroactive), (2) testable (or falsifiable), (3) parsimonious, (4) of broad scope, and (5) integratable or cumulative with a coherent and expanding corpus of theories.

SCIENCE Scientific theories are held as tentative approximations, never as "facts" (64). Science is the best system yet devised for reducing subjective bias, error, untruths, lies, and frauds (65). Science is by definition a generalizing form of knowledge (66).

EPISTEMOLOGY The epistemological principles for the study of sociocultural systems are: (1) the separation of mental events (thoughts) from behavior (actions of body parts and their environmental effects) and (2) the separation of emic from etic views of thoughts and behavior.

EMIC/ETIC Observers have the option of describing both kinds of events in terms of categories that are defined, identified, and validated by the community of participants (emics) or by the community of observers (etics) (66).

Four types of knowledge stem from these distinctions: (1) emics of thought; (2) emics of behavior; (3) etics of behavior; (4) etics of thought. Emic and etic versions of social life are often but not necessarily contradictory.

ASSUMPTION The theoretical principles of cultural materialism rest on the assumption that certain categories of behavioral and mental responses are more directly important to the survival and well-being of human individuals than others (67).

BIOGRAM The categories of responses whose costs and benefits underwrite cultural selection and cultural evolution are empirically derived from the biological and psychological sciences that deal with the genetically given needs, drives, aversions, and behavioral tendencies of Homo sapiens [human biogram]: sex, hunger, thirst, sleep, language acquisition, need for affective nurturance, nutritional and metabolic processes, vulnerability to mental and physical disease and to stress (68).

CAUSALITY The components of social life which most directly mediate and facilitate the satisfaction of biogram needs, drives, aversions, and behavioral tendencies constitute to causal center of socicultural systems.

INFRASTRUCTURE The burden of this mediation is borne by the conjunction of demographic, technological, economic, and ecological processes--- the modes of production and reproduction--- found in every sociocultural system. The causal center is the etic behavioral infrastructure.

Infrastructure constitutes the interface between nature in the form of unalterable physical, chemical, biological, and psychological constraints on the one hand, and culture which is Homo sapien's primary means of optimizing health and well-being, on the other.

It is the unalterability of the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology therefore that gives infrastructure its initial strategic priority in the formulation of cultural materialist theories (68).

STRUCTURE/SUPERSTRUCTURE In addition to infrastructure, every human sociocultural system consists of two other major subsystems: structure and superstructure, each with its mental/behavioral and emic/etic aspects (68-69).

Structure denotes the domestic and politics subsystems, while superstructure denotes the realm of values, aesthetics, rules, beliefs, symbols, rituals, religions, philosophies, and other forms of knowledge including science itself.

PRIMACY The basic theoretical principles of cultural materialism can now be stated: (1) optimizations of the costs/benefits of satisfying biogram needs probabilistically (i.e. with more than chance significance) determine (or select for) changes in the etic behavioral infrastructure; (2) changes in the etic behavioral infrastructure probabilistically select for changes in the rest of the sociocultural system. The combination of 1 and 2 is the principle of the primacy of infrastructure.

Components of the etic behavioral infrastructure are treated as independent variables while components of structure and superstructure are treated as dependent variables.

TASK The main task of cultural materialism is to concentrate on building a corpus of testable theories that is broader, more coherent, and more interpenetrating than the theories of alternative research strategies (69).

ISSUE The issue is not whether thought is important for action, but whether thoughts and actions are equally important in the explanation of the evolution of sociocultural systems. Cultural materialism ... says no.... Infrastuctural variables are more determinative of the evolution of the system (70).

* Verbatim excerpts from Marvin Harris, 1994, "Cultural Materialism Is Alive and Well and Won't Go Away Until Something Better Comes Along," in Assessing Cultural Anthropology, Robert Borofsky, ed., NY: McGraw-Hill, Inc., pp. 62-76.