Studying Societies and Cultures

Marvin Harris's Cultural Materialism and its Legacy

Lawrence A. Kuznar, Stephen K. Sanderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317251248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

"A thought-provoking, stimulating volume on the past, present and future of cultural materialism that is both laudatory of Harris' research strategy and critical of it." Paul Shankman, University of Colorado One of the most important anthropologists of all time, Marvin Harris was influential worldwide as the founder of cultural materialism. This book accessibly analyzes Harris's theories and their important legacies today. The chapters explore cultural materialism's epistemology and its relation to rational choice theory, Darwinian social science, and population pressures. The authors assess recent attempts to extend and reformulate cultural materialism and highlight cross-cultural, archaeological, and ethnographic applications of cultural materialism today.

Part 1

The Legacy of Cultural Materialism: I

Chapter One

The Impact of Cultural Materialism

A Bibliometric Analysis of the Writings of Marvin Harris

Pamela Effrein Sandstrom and Howard D. White

ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF A SCHOLAR on a field of study is daunting, especially when that scholar is as prolific and controversial as Marvin Harris. This chapter is the first in a volume aimed at appraising the significance of the cultural materialist research strategy to which Harris dedicated his life. We will document Harris’s publishing career and demonstrate his influence in anthropology and cognate fields using bibliometric techniques developed by information scientists. These techniques are nicknamed CAMEOs, short for “Characterizations Automatically Made and Edited Online” (White, 2001). They make visible the authors that Harris cited and reveal the researchers who cited him in turn. They also suggest his topical range. By modeling the professional interests of Harris and those interested in his work, we glimpse into the social and intellectual structure of contemporary social and behavioral science and trace Harris’s impact within and across disciplinary boundaries. This CAMEO portrait of Harris provides a systematic and empirically based look at the content and breadth of cultural materialism. It is designed to reflect the same scientific methodological requirements that were near and dear to Harris’s research program.

We are able to create CAMEO portraits because scholars tend to cite their intellectual forebears and thereby trade in what Robert Merton (1968:56) called the “coin of recognition.” Citation is a universal norm of science and scholarship that transcends material or epistemological allegiances (White, 2004). It reflects the social nature of science where research paradigms change systematically and an individual scholar’s career relates to others to form a recognizable lineage of knowledge (see Merton, 1976; Cronin, 1984, 2005). Thousands of individual information-seeking behaviors and decisions about what to take heed of, read, and cite are recorded in footnotes and cited reference lists. These choices are constrained by a scholar’s skills, a shared literature and disciplinary history, and the social organization of the scholarly workforce. The arrangements by which scholars keep informed and avoid information overload are adaptive features of a socioecological system of “public knowledge” (Wilson, 1977) and “external memory” (White, 1992). By framing these arrangements in a cost-benefit model, scholars’ searching and handling of resources in libraries and information systems can be seen to follow the same behavioral ecological principles used by human and animal foragers as they exploit their natural environments (Sandstrom, 1994, 1998, 1999, 2001). CAMEO profiles are based on cumulative, empirical traces of scholars’ decision-making behavior. Thus, the CAMEO profile of Marvin Harris is not a finished portrait but instead a work in progress as today’s researchers and social thinkers either neglect or make new use of the past. Like archaeological evidence, however, the patterns detectable using bibliometric techniques tend to be robust and persist over time.

To portray Harris, we gathered bibliographic data on the output of his publishing career. He was a productive scholar who wrote eighteen books (thirteen solo authored, two coauthored, and three coedited volumes) and more than 100 articles, book chapters, and substantive comments. Harris gave interviews recorded in print, audio, and video formats, wrote entries for scholarly encyclopedias, regularly contributed columns to such periodicals as Natural History and Psychology Today, and prepared more than thirty book reviews for publication in the professional literature (e.g., American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Man, Human Ecology, Ethnohistory, Hispanic American Historical Review, Political Science Quarterly, Social Forces, Academy of Management Review) and the popular press (e.g., Saturday Review, New York Times, Washington Post). OCLC’s WorldCat attests to Harris’s stature as an author. This worldwide database of more than 60 million bibliographic records includes more than 140 records for multiple editions of his popular and scholarly books translated into at least seventeen different languages. Harris (1999b:11) himself identified the following books as among his “most influential”:

The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (1968b)

Culture, People, Nature (seven editions, 1971–1997)

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture (1974a)

Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (1977)

Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (1979)

Our Kind (1989)

Appendix B to this volume provides a chronological listing of Harris’s writings. We intend the bibliography to be complete and definitive but have found that Harris’s writings are scattered and sometimes difficult to identify and locate. We now realize that the definitive compilation (and certainly others’ commentaries on it) can only approach completion. The bibliography represents a compromise of a sort that Harris was willing to make but never ceased trying to improve upon.

Ego-Centered Citation Analysis

Despite the complexity imposed by the sheer growth in the number of documents and increasingly elaborate externalized systems of memory, the imperative to synthesize a field’s literature, and the body of writing of a single scholar within it, remains a common goal of scholarship. (See Harris [1968b:614] on the “indigestible quantities of raw data” that threaten information systems and the importance of a nomothetic approach to summarizing literatures.) Characterizing the interests and concerns of anthropology in general during the second half of the twentieth century, including Marvin Harris’s cultural materialism, would traditionally entail taking a bibliographic or editorial approach to the problem. After a massive, long-term compilation and close reading of a subject literature, the dedicated reader would emerge an expert. He or she would grasp the important names, publication outlets, keywords, dates, and other features that describe the area of interest. As an alternative strategy, a bibliometric approach is now possible using online information systems and graphical software to model—literally, visualize—the social and intellectual networks within a literature (White and McCain, 1989, 1997; also White and Griffith, 1981).

Bibliometricians, information retrievalists, and database designers deal with many types of relationships among people and literatures. One common aim they have is to produce accurate snapshots of the relationships among factors (such as authors, journals, subjects, references in a paper, citations to a paper, etc.) by creating visual images and other displays that can be readily interpreted by anyone who is interested in a subject domain or an individual who figures prominently within it. Much like the kinship diagrams used by anthropologists, the focal author of such an analysis app...