Marvin Harris (1) (1927–2001)

The first couple of chapters were mild-blowingly good. I thought Harris' explanations of foods that are taboo or vaunted and how those roles are not only logical, but dictated by the socioenvironmental setting in which they originate fascinating. He treats cultural norms as almost the results of Darwinian processes, which is a fascinating and really revolutionary approach. I was awed both by his treatment of rules that are second nature to me, like Jewish dietary laws, as well as those that show more were quite foreign. Harris was a breath of fresh air to the "anthropology" I was exposed to in undergrad that tried to impress upon us that there is no way to understand other cultures and that trying to do so is cultural appropriation in and of itself.

However, the second half of the book fell flat. Perhaps it's because, as a Jew, I don't share Harris' fascination with Jesus (so much Jesus. Three chapters of Jesus. It was SO tedious) or because Harris' treatise on New England witches has really become conventional wisdom. Either way, I finished this book mostly through a sice of obligation. show less

Today, while lamenting the sidelining of fiction in favor of informational texts to the exclusion of just about anything else in English classes with a friend, I mentioned that no one had ever learned to love to read by reading a textbook. However, I had to immediately correct myself by adding "except for Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches and The Day the Universe Changed: How Galileo's Telescope Changed the Truth."

I read Marvin Harris' scintillating book in 1978. Although an accessible paperback show more designed for a general readership, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches provided a fabulous text for my sociology class on how abstruse actions by other cultures are not quite so inexplicable once you understand the culture. Despite being first published in 1978, it's as fresh as it was when the late Harris, then a professor at Columbia University, released it. While Westerners like to lord it over the unthinking wogs, Harris provides examples on how facile that attitude can be. For example, protecting cows and letting them wander makes sense in an impoverished India where bovines provide street cleaning by eating compostable garbage, their dung makes cheap cement, and their milk will always be available since the temptation to slaughter them for their meat is checked.

But the book isn't a stern polemic; rather, Harris presents the material in a charming and often humorous manner. Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches proves as riveting as a whodunit or one of the new YA adventure tales. The reader will forget s/he's reading what was for many years a sociology and anthropology text and instead think s/he's stumbled on a travelogue crossed with The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights. show less

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches is an informative, unconventional, and at times hilarious approach to exposing the forces at work in human culture that produce some of its most surprising extremes of social pathology, and even exposes the oft-ignored foundational assumptions of some of western culture's most sacred cows (so to speak) along the way. It addresses:

* literal sacred cows

* swine both sacred and profane

* primitive chauvinism; the formation of warrior cultures

* the path of development show more from individualist reciprocal cultures through collectivist charity-prestige cultures all the way to modern cultures of redistributive and hierarchical authoritarian oppression

* the whitewashing of military messianism to produce the contemporary morality of peace

* the rise of witchcraft hysteria

The path the book's explanations follow ultimately culminates in a scathing analysis of postmodernism and moral relativism that reveals many aspects of the late twentieth century's popular "counterculture" that serve to keep potentially revolutionary social forces docile and ineffective at enacting much change. The author's particular loathing for the hypocritical inconsistencies of counter-culture thought leaders of his time, which tended to particularly attack the scientific underpinnings of his own field (anthropology), added some spice and enjoyably pointed remarks to the text.

It's an excellent read, and an easy read as well, and I recommend it for people trying to understand politics, economics, and culture in a fundamental manner.

For me, the most interesting take-away from the book was the picture the author painted of how environmental pressures have contributed to the evolution of oppressive, redistributive authoritarian hierarchies, via a few intermediate cultural stages, from early individualist reciprocal cultures. This evolution is clearly not a necessary state of affairs, but in many ways it is a natural state of affairs that -- if you ignore matters of ethical concern for the rights of individuals -- can be quite effective at achieving certain ends of sustainable society.

It becomes obvious to a thoughtful reader working through this book that there are environmental pressures that must be addressed for a culture to achieve stable survival, and overly simplistic, top-down organization of society will only be bent by necessity to those ends, skewing the organizational efforts from their intended goals along the way. The lesson from this, it seems, is that putting too much faith in large-scale authoritarian hierarchies (as opposed to practical self-organizing hierarchies on a smaller scale) is bound to lead to disappointment. show less

En esta obra sorprendente, Harris aborda una serie de “enigmas culturales” aparentemente irracionales (¿por qué los hindúes veneran vacas?, ¿por qué judíos y musulmanes evitan el cerdo?, ¿por qué las sociedades han recurrido a guerras o cacerías de brujas?) y los interpreta a partir de causas materiales, ecológicas y económicas, mostrando que detrás de tradiciones aparentemente irracionales hay lógicas adaptativas.