Fauler Zauber. Unsere Sehnsucht nach der anderen Welt (original 1974; edition 1993)

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches has often been cited in discussions about why religious customs are the way they are. I've seen it mentioned all over the web in the last ten years or so, but it was difficult to get a copy. I eventually resorted to an interlibrary loan since neither my local system nor the local universities have copies.

While Harris writes a persuasive argument for his theories of cultural materialism, much of what he discusses, uses as examples, or provides as reference/sources is fairly dated. In this case, I can understand why my local libraries don't carry a copy, and why it has gone out of print. But I still find Harris's arguments compelling and, if not entirely persuasive at times due to more recent research, thought-provoking.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that prior to reading the book, I was already heavily inclined towards cultural materialism. When I was a child in Catholic school (from kindergarten all the way through high school), most other religions and folkloric practices were taught with a heavily cultural materialistic bent - in fact, it was because of this slant to my education of other cultures that I ultimately rejected Catholicism and religion entirely. So, you can see, I was ready to accept Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches without much trouble.

The book is divided into four main sections, each intending to explain how the topic (as noted in the title) is held sacred, or otherwise what they mean to a specific culture. Of course, for cows, Harris speaks of India. Pigs apply to Middle Eastern religions as well as Papua New Guineans. When discussing wars, Harris mentions several cultures but primarily focuses on the Yanomamo, relying on the work of Chagnon, and also the messiahs of the Jews in the Middle East. And for witches, he discusses the witches of the Middle Ages and Puritan England, and also...it got a bit fuzzy for me, something about the counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s and shamans.

The dated feeling of the book is probably obvious from what I listed above - not just in the counter-culture section at the end, but also in the way Harris treats Chagnon's research, and the evidence presented regarding the historical figure of Jesus Christ (he seems to accept Josephus as a reliable source, though I've only heard his name in contexts that suggest, or outright state, that Josephus is no more reliable than others writing after the fact, which is to say not very reliable at all).

Because Harris's arguments building upon each other beginning with the cows and leading up to the counter-culture...whatever that was, to doubt or disagree with him at one point makes it harder to follow him further. He also relies a little too much on purely materialistic explanations, whereas I tend to believe that whim and art can be seeds of larger patterns (this is one of my arguments against Jared Diamond's Gun, Germs, and Steel as well), though practical concerns are probably the majority factors of most of the "strange" cultural markers.

This was worth my time reading, and it was very interesting, but on the whole, it is from 1974 and I read it in 2012. While I took a lot out of it, it was often just too dated to be relevant anymore - and I went into the book wanting to be persuaded to Harris's way. ( )

Fine as far as it goes (although too materialist for my taste, but I knew that about Harris), but the final chapters blaming all of society's current and future ills on the counter-culture movement are baffling. ( )

The title "Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The riddles of Culture" peeked my curiosity instantly, and I eagerly read this engaging book which delves into some seemingly perplexing riddles, which, as it turns out, have some very practical explanations. ( )

Civilizations, even the most advanced among them, are invariably strewn with mythologies, folklore, and recherche taboo. While the contemporary United States would itself provide enough material for a multi-volume study of this kind, Marvin Harris focuses mostly on pre-scientific and pre-literate peoples to answer questions like: Why do Hindus not eat cows, while Jews avoid pork instead? How do you explain the concept of the Messiah? Why was the belief in witches in medieval Europe so prevalent, and why were people so afraid of them? These bald facts have received many anthropological and sociological explanations in the past, including the one that suggests that they are simply irreducible and, therefore, unable to be analyzed. But Harris, a Marxist by conviction, necessarily must see a materialistic explanation. He looks for answers to these questions in the everyday lives and concerns of the people that entertain these beliefs. Because of this, his answers, in most instances, seem to have some bit more explanatory force than those that have preceded him.

According to Harris, the reason why we see Hindu "cow love" (his words, not mine) as odd is because we live in a very fundamentally different position with respect to cows in our day-to-day postindustrial lives. No matter the exigencies or problems in the lives of the market or our family, we can always go to the grocery story and purchase milk, butter, and meat all from a cow. However, Hindus (and he is mostly talking about Indian Hindus here) have acquired the need for an adaptive resilience in its agricultural order that we have long since shed our need for. Hundreds of millions of Indian peasants who have only one cow know that animal as the only source of milk to make it through a dry season. And if they are lucky enough to make it, it is the only thing that can pull a plow once it is time to plant or harvest crops. In short, because of the way their economy is localized around the family unit instead of our food-industrial complex, they place a different value on the cow.

Another topic Harris considers is the first-century Palestinian Judaism with its concomitant messianism. The history of this period, mainly through Josephus' two reliable books "Jewish Antiquities" and "Bellum Judaicum," informs us that Jesus was not unique in having the mantle of the Messiah. Between 40 B. C. and 73 A. D., Harris mentions Athrongaeus, Theudas, an "anonymous scoundrel" executed by Felix, a Jewish Egyptian "false prophet," and Manahem. Josephus was so used to this political apocalypticism that there are even more of these figures that he doe not even bother to name. A long line of Jews fashioned themselves as restorers of the Jewish state and wished to free it from the caprice of Roman satraps, with Jesus and John the Baptist being the two whose names have survived the ravages of history.

Harris' explanation of witchcraft is appealingly commonsensical. During the early middle ages, witchcraft was not especially looked highly upon, but was never considered heretical. Over time, the Church found that they could use these beliefs to scapegoat hailstorms, outbreaks of disease, crop failure, and other ominous signs, therefore stopping people before they reached the heterodox conclusion that God might be involved in all of these negative circumstances, too. Instead of the Catholic Church wishing to root witches out of society, they used the common folkloric beliefs in sorcery to the Church's advantage. By co-opting sorcery as a heresy, the Church was able to blame the evils of society on its more marginal, "lower" members, while at the same time seeming to want to keep both the Church and society pure. Two birds with one stone!

I can certainly appreciate the broad appeal a book like this has for non-specialists and non-scholars. That having been said, if I could change one thing about this book, it would be that Harris had taken a less flippant approach and more fully fleshed out his sources, or had a full bibliography. Off-the-cuff expressions like "cow love" and "pig hate" really tend to draw away from the authority that Harris has proven though his other work he rightly deserves. ( )

Although it has been written in 1974, the views are so - modern. At the same time, clear headed and very clever. The book ends with a great, to-the-point conclusion: "Yet, there is sound basis for assuming that by struggling to demystify our ordinary consciousness we shall improve the prospects for peace and economic and political justice. If this potential change of odds in our favor be ever so slight, I think, we must regard the expansion of scientific objectivity into the domain of lifestyle riddles as a moral imperative. It's the only thing that's never been tried." ( )