Cultural Materialism Essay example -- essays research papers

When it comes to anthropological theory the combination of several established trends of thought frequently result in a completely new and independent way of thinking. Cultural Materialism is one of these children theories that resulted from a coming together of affable evolutionary theory, ethnic ecology and Marxist materialism (Barfield). The goal of ethnical materialism is to explain politics, economics, ideology and symbolic aspects of a culture with coincidence to the needs of that society. From a cultural materialist point of view society is indisputably regulate by the factors of production and reproduction. From this all other facets of society, such as giving medication and religion, must be beneficial to that societys ability to come across the minimum requirements to sustain themselves (Harris 1996). An example of this would be the invention and continued lend oneself of industry because it increased the ability to produce needed materials and food. One strategi c aspect of the cultural materialistic get is that it operates completely from the etic perspective. Marvin Harris, one of the founders of cultural materialism, believed that a holistic approach is vital to correctly analyzing culture and believed that the emic approach failed at providing a wide enough scope. Harris tried to employ the scientific method and incorporated it into his theory. The result of this is that cultural materialism focuses only on events that are observable and quantifiable and replicable (Harris 1979). Cultu...