Cultural Materialism

This book is a good introduction to Harris' thought, but I wonder whether one wouldn't learn more about it from reading /Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches/, and thus seeing that thought in action.

The problem with this book is, it's a good introduction to Harris' thought which is about a hundred pages long, followed by 200+ pages of excoriation and ridicule directed at just about everyone else who has ever postulated a theory of anthropology. Some of his take-downs are entertaining, but all are a bit unedifying, and it felt like most of the energy Harris put into this book, he invested in academic warfare with his rivals, not in expressing and refining his theory itself.

This is a shame. Harris' theory is that behaviors and beliefs are show more adaptations to a society's conditions. It sometimes doesn't work (he misses the semiotic core of Jewish dietary law, for example), and it can easily put the cart before the horse or degenerate into a parody of itself ("libertarianism for collective minds", a friend of mine called it), but it helps you look at things from an unexpected angle, and can reveal insights that one would miss completely without it.

And every once in a while, his theory clicks very well with otherwise-inexplicable phenomena; if his theory about the Maring and their periodic feasts (in /Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches/) isn't a classic of the genre, it really ought to be. show less

En esta obra clave, Harris presenta el enfoque del materialismo cultural: muestra cómo los factores materiales, ecológicos y económicos influyen decisivamente en la organización de las sociedades humanas, explicando costumbres, creencias y estructuras simbólicas a partir de necesidades adaptativas y procesos de producción-reproducción.